Hiroshima

First published in the NEW YORKER, August, 1946

Published in Penguin Books

November 1946

C

Made and printed in Great Britain

for Penguin Books Ltd. by C. Nicholls and Co. Ltd.

London* Manchester, Reading

PUBLISHERS' NOTE-
ON Monday, "August 6th, 1945, a new era in human .
history opened. After years of intensive research and
experiment, conducted in their later stages mainly in
America, by scientists of many nationalities, Japanese
among them, the forces which hold together the con-
stituent particles of the atom had at last been harnessed
to man's use: and on that day man used them. By a
decision of the American military authorities, made,
it is said, in defiance of the protests of many of the
scientists who had worked on the project, an atomic
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. As a direct result,
some 60,000 Japanese men, women and children were
killed, and 100,000 injured ; and almost the whole of a
great seaport, a city of 250,000 people, was destroyed
by blast or by fire. As an indirect result, a few days
later, Japan acknowledged defeat, and the Second
World War came to an end.

For many months little exact and reliable news
about the details of the destruction wrought by the
first atomic bomb reached Western readers. Millions
of words were written, in Europe and America, ex-
plaining the marvellous new powers that science had
placed in men's hands; describing the researches and
experiments that had led up to this greatest of all
disclosures of Nature's secrets: discussing the pro-
blems for man's future which the new weapon raised.
Argument waxed furious as to the ethics of the bomb :
should the Japanese have received advance warning

v

of America's intention to use it ? Should a demon-
stration bomb have been exploded in the presence of
enemy observers in some remote spot where it would
do a minimum of damage, as a warning to the Japanese
people, before its first serious use ? But of the feelings
and reactions of the people of Hiroshima to the bomb,
nothing, or at least nothing that was not pure imagina-
tion, could be written ; for nothing was known.

Tn May, 1946, The New Yorker sent John Hersey,
journalist and author of A Bell for Adano, to the Far
East to find out what had really happened at Hiro-
shima : to interview survivors of the catastrophe, to
endeavour to describe what they had seen and felt and
thought, what the destruction of their city, their lives
and homes and hopes and friends, had meant to them
in short, the cost of the bomb in terms of human
suffering and reaction to suffering. He stayed in Japan
for a month, gathering his own material with little, if
any, help from the occupying authorities ; he obtained
the stories from actual witnesses. The characters in his
account are living individuals, not composite types.
The story is their own story, told as far as possible in
their own words. On August 31st, 1946, Hersey's
story was made public. For the first time in The New
Yorker's career an issue appeared which, within the*
familiar covers, bearing for such covers are prepared
long in advance a picnic scene, carried no satire, no
cartoons, no fiction, no verse or smart quips or shop-
ping notes : nothing but its advertisement matter and
Hersey's 30,000-word story.

That story is built round the experiences of six
people who were in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped,

VI

each of whom, by some strange chance, escaped, not
unscathed, but at least with life. One, a Roman
Catholic missionary priest, was a German; the other
five were Japanese: a Red Cross hospital doctor,
another doctor with a private practice, an office girl,
a Protestant clergyman, and a tailor's widow. For
some time after the bomb had fallen, none of them
knew exactly what had happened : they hardly realised
that their old familiar life had ended, that they had
been chosen by chance, or destiny, or as two of them
at any rate would have put it by God, to be helpless
small-part actors in an unparalleled tragedy. Bit by
bit came the awakening to the magnitude of the
calamity that had removed, in a flash, nearly all their
accustomed world.

Hersey's vivid yet matter-of-fact story tells what the
bomb did to each of these six people, through the hours
and the days that followed its impact on their lives.
It is written soberly, with no attempt whatever to
"pile on the agony" the presentation at times is
almost cold in its economy of words. To six ordinary
men and women, at the time and afterwards, it seemed
like this.

The New Yorker's original intention was to make the
story a serial. But in an inspired moment, the paper's
editors saw that it must be published as a single
whole and decided to devote a whole issue to Hersey's
masterpiece of reconstruction. For ten days Hersey
^feverishly rewrote and polished his story, handing it
out by instalments to the printers, and no hint of what
was in the air escaped from The New Yorker office.
On August 31st, in the paper's usual format, the

Vli

historic issue appeared. It created a first-order
sensation in American journalistic history : a few
hours after publication the issue was sold out. Applica-
tions poured in for permission to serialise the story in
other American journals, among them the New York
Herald Tribune, Washington Post, Chicago Sun, and
Boston Globe. A condensed version the cuts person-
ally approved by Hersey was broadcast in four
instalments by the American Broadcasting Company.
Some fifty newspapers in the U.S. eventually obtained
permission to use the story in serial form, the copyright
fees, after tax deduction, at Mersey's direction going to
the American Red Cross. Albert Einstein ordered
a thousand copies of the New Yorker containing the
story. Even stage rights were sought from the author,
though he refused to give permission for dramatisation.
British newspapers and press syndicates immediately
cabled for reproduction rights : but the New Yorker's
executives insisted that no cutting could be permitted,
and with British paper rationing, full newspaper
publication was seen to be impracticable. The book
production rights for the United States were secured
by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and the American Book of
the Month Club chose it for publication as an "Extra" ;
and the B.B.C. obtained permission to broadcast the
article in full in four episodes as part of their new
Third Programme.

Penguin Books, feeling that Kersey's story should
receive the widest possible circulation in Great Britain,-
immediately cabled to Alfred A. Knopf for, and were
accorded, permission to issue it complete in book
form. It here appears save for following English
vm

spelling conventions in an edition of 250,000 copies,
exactly as it appeared in the pages of the New Yorker.
Many accounts have been published telling so far as
security considerations allow how the atom bomb
works. But here, for the first time, is not a description
of scientific triumphs, of intricate machines, new
elements, and mathematical formulas, but an account
of what the bomb does seen through the eyes of some
of those to whom it did it : of those who endured one
of the world's most catastrophic experiences, and lived.

IX

HIROSHIMA

The following note

appeared in the NEW YORKER of 31 dugusf, 1946,
as an introduction to John Hersey's article

The NEW YORKER this week devotes its entire

editorial space to an article on the almost complete

obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and

what happened to the people of that city. It does

so in the conviction that few of us have yet

comprehended the all but incredible destructive

power of this weapon, and that everyone might

wed take time to consider the terrible

implications of its use.

I .

A NOISELESS FLASH

AT exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning,
on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment
when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima,
Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel depart-
ment at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at
her place in the plant office and was turning her head
to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same
moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down
cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of
his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven
deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo
Nakamura, a tailor's widow, stood by the window
of her kitchen watching a neighbpur tearing down his
house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defence
fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German
priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear
on a cot on the top floor of his order's three-storey
mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der
Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the
surgical staff of the city's large, modern Red Cross
Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors
with a blood specimen for a Wassennann test in his
hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tammoto,
pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at
the door of a rich man's house in Koi, the city's western
suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of
things he* had evacuated from town in fear of the
massive B29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima
to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed

14 HIROSHIMA

by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the
survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so
many others died. Each of them counts many small
items of chance or volition -a step taken in time, a
decision to go indoors, catching one street-car instead
of the next that spared him. And now each knows
that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw
more death than he ever thought he would see. At the
time none of them knew anything.

t jhe Reverend Mr. Tanimoto got up at five o'clock
that morning. He was alone in the parsonage, because
for some time his wife had been commuting with their
year-old baby to spend nights with a friend in Ushida,
a suburb to the north. Of all the important cities of
Japan, only two, Kyoto and Hiroshima, had not been
visited in strength by B-san, or Mr. B, as the Japanese
with a mixture of respect and unhappy familiarity,
called the B-29 ; and Mr. Tanimoto, like all his neigh-
bours and friends, was almost sick with anxiety. He
had heard uncomfortably detailed accounts of mass
raids on Kure, Iwakuni, Tokuyama, and other nearby
towns; he was sure Hiroshima's turn would come
soon. He had slept badly the night before, because
there had been several air-raid warnings. Hiroshima
had been getting such warnings almost every night for
weeks, for at that time the B-29s were using Lake Biwa,
north-east of Hiroshima, as a rendezvous point, and no
matter what city the Americans planned to hit, the
Super-fortresses streamed in over the coast near
Hiroshima. The frequency of the 'warnings and the
continued abstinence of Mr. B with respect to Hiro-
shima had made its citizens jittery ; a rumour was going

A NOISELESS FLASH 15

around that the Americans were saving something
special for the city.

Mr. Tanimoto is a small man, quick to talk, laugh,
and cry. He wears his black hair parted in the middle
and rather long ; the prominence of the frontal bones
just above his eyebrows and the smallness of his
moustache, mouth, and chin give him a strange, old-
young look, boyish and yet wise, weak and yet fiery.
He moves nervously and fast, but with a restraint which
suggests that he is a cautious, thoughtful man. He
showed, indeed, just those qualities in the uneasy days
before the bomb fell. Besides having his wife spend
the nights in Ushida, Mr. Tanimoto had been carrying
all the portable things from his church, in the close-
packed residential district called Nagaragawa, to a
house that belonged to a rayon manufacturer in Koi,
two miles from the centre of town. The rayon man,
a Mr. Matsui, had opened his then unoccupied estate
to a large number of his friends and acquaintances,
so that they might evacuate whatever they wished
to a safe distance from the probable target area. Mr.
Tanimoto had no difficulty in moving chairs, hymnals,
Bibles, altar gear, and church records by pushcart
himself, but the organ console and an upright piano
required some aid. A friend of his named Matsuo
had, the day before, helped him get the piano out to
Koi; in return, he had promised this day to assist
Mr. Matsuo in hauling out a daughter's belongings.
That is why he had risen so early.

Mr. Tanimoto cooked his own breakfast. He felt
awfully tired. The effort of moving the piano the day
before, a sleepless night, weeks of worry and unbalanced

16 HIROSHIMA

diet, the cares of his parish all combined to make him
feel hardly adequate to the new day's work. There
was another thing, too: Mr. Tanimoto had studied
theology at Emory College, in Atlanta, Georgia; he
had graduated in 1940; he spoke excellent English;
he dressed in American clothes ; he had corresponded
with many American friends right up to the time
the 'war began ; and among a people obsessed with a
fear of being spied upon perhaps almost obsessed
himselfhe found himself growing increasingly uneasy.
The police had questioned him several times, and
just a few days before, he had heard that an influential
acquaintance, a Mr. Tanaka, a retired officer of the
Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line, an anti-Christian,
a man famous in Hiroshima for his showy philan-
thropies and notorious for his personal tyrannies, had
been telling people that Tanimoto should not be
trusjted. In compensation, to show himself publicly
a good Japanese, Mr. Tanimoto had taken on the
chairmanship of his local tonarigumi, or Neighbourhood
Association, and to his other duties and concerns
this position had added the business of organising
air-raid defence for about twenty families.

Before six o'clock that morning, Mr. Tanimoto
started for Mr. Matsuo's house. There he found that
their burden was to be a tansu, a large Japanese cabinet,
full of clothing and household goods. The two mei^
set out, The morning was perfectly clear and so warm
that the day promised to be uncomfortable. A few
minutes after they started, the air raid siren went off *
a minute-long blast that warned of approaching planes
but indicated to the people of Hiroshima only a slight

A NOISELESS FLASH 17

degree of danger, * since it sounded every morning at
this time, when an American weather plane came over.
The two men pulled and pushed the handcart through
the city streets. Hiroshima was a fan-shaped city,
lying mostly on the six islands formed by the seven
estuarial rivers that branch out from the Ota River;
its main commercial and residential districts, covering
about four square miles in the centre of the city,
contained three-quarters of its population, which had
been reduced by several evacuation programmes from a
wartime peak of 380,000 to about 245,000. Factories
and other residential districts, or suburbs, lay compactly
around the edges of the city. To the south were the
docks, an airport, and an island-studded Inland Sea.
A rim of mountains runs around the other three sides
of the delta. Mr. Tanimoto and Mr. Matsuo took
their way through the shopping centre, already full of
people, and across two of the rivers to the sloping
streets of Koi, and up them to the outskirts and foot-
hills. As they started up a valley away from the tight-
ranked houses, the all-clear sounded. (The Japanese
radar operators, detecting only three planes, supposed
that they comprised a reconnaissance.) Pushing the
handcart up to the raydn man's house* was tiring,
and the men, after they had manoeuvred their load
into the driveway and to the front steps, paused to
rest awhile. They stood with a wing of the house
between them and the city. Like most homes in this
part of Japan, the house consisted of a wooden frame
and wooden walls supporting a heavy tile roof. Its
front hall, packed with rolls of bedding and clothing,
looked like a cool cave full of fat cushions. Opposite

18 HIROSHIMA

the house, to the right of the front door, there was a
large, finicky rock garden. There was no sound of
planes. The morning was still; the place was cool
and pleasant.

Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky.
Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it travelled
from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It
seemed a sheet of sun. Both he and Mr. Matsuo
reacted in terror and both had time to react (for they *
were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the centre of the
explosion). Mr. Matsuo dashed up the front steps
into the house and dived among the bedrolls and
buried himself there. Mr. Tanimoto took four or
five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in
the garden. He bellied up very hard against one of
them. As his face was against the stone he did not
see what happened. He felt a sudden pressure, and
then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of
tile fell on him. He heard no roar. (Almost no one
in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb.
But a fisherman in his sampan on the Inland Sea near
Tsuzu, the man with whom Mr. Tanimoto's mother-in-
law and sister-in-law were living, saw the flash and
heard a tremendous explosion; he was nearly twenty
miles from Hiroshima, but the thunder was greater
than when the B-29s hit Iwakuni, only five miles away,)

When he dared, Mr. Tanimoto raised his head and
saw that the rayon man's house had collapsed. He
thou'ght a bomb had fallen directly on it. Such clouds
of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight
around. In panic, not thinking for the moment of
Mr. Matsuo under the ruins, he dashed out into the

A NOISELESS FLASH 19

street. He noticed as he ran that the concrete wall of
the estate had fallen over toward the house rather
than away from it. In the street, the first thing he
saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing
into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands
of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended
to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers
were coming out of the hole, where they should have
been safe, and blood was running from their heads,
chests and backs. They were silent and dazed.

Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day
grew darker and darker.

At nearly midnight, the night before the bomb was
dropped, an announcer on the city's radio station said
that about two hundred B-29s were approaching
southern Honshti and advised the population of
Hiroshima to evacuate to their designated " safe
areas." Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the tailor's widow
who lived in the section called Nobori-cho and who had
long had a habit of doing as she was told, got her three
children a ten-year-old boy, Toshio, an eight-year-old
girl, Yaeko, and a five-year-old girl, Myeko out of
bed and dressed them and walked with them to the
military area known as the East Parade Ground, on
the north-east edge of the city. There she unrolled
some mats and the children lay down on them. They
slept until about two* when they were awakened by the
roar of the planes going over Hiroshima. As soon as
the planes had passed, Mrs. Nakamura started back
with her children. They reached home a little after
two-thirty and she immediately turned 4 on the radio,
which, to her distress, was just then broadcasting a

20 HIROSHIMA

fresh warning. When she looked at the children and
saw how tired they were, and when she thought of the
number of trips they had made in past weeks, all to no
purpose, to the East Parade .Ground, she decided that
in spite of the instructions on the radio, she simply
could not face starting out all over again. She put
the children in their bedrolls on the floor, lay down
herself at three o'clock, and fell asleep at once, so
soundly that when planes passed over later, she did
not waken to their sound.

The siren jarred her awake at about seven. She
arose, dressed quickly, and hurried to the house of
Mr. Nakamoto, the head of her Neighbourhood
Association, and asked him what she should do. He
said that she should remain at home unless an urgent
warning a series of intermittent blasts of the siren
was sounded. She returned home, lit the stove in the
kitchen, set some rice to cook, and sat down to read
that morning's Hiroshima Chugoku. To her relief,
the all-clear sounded at eight o'clock. She heard the
children stirring, so she went and gave each of them
a handful of peanuts and told them to stay on their
bedrolls, because they w&re tired from the night's
walk. She had hoped that they would go back to
sleep, but the man in the house directly to the south
began to make a terrible hullabaloo of hammering,
wedging, ripping, and splitting. The prefectural
government, convinced, as everyone in Hiroshima was,
that the city would be attacked soon, had began to
press with threats and warnings for the completion
of wide fire lanes, which, it' was hoped, might act in
conjunction with the rivers to localise any fires started

A NOISELESS FLASH 21

by an incendiary raid ; and the neighbour was reluct-
antly sacrificing his home to the city's safety. Just the
day before, the prefecture had ordered all able-bodied
girls from the secondary -schools to spend a few days
helping to clear these lanes, and they started work soon
after the all-clear sounded.

Mrs. Nakamura went back to the kitchen, looked at
the rice, and began watching the man next door. At
first she was annoyed with him for making so much
noise, but then she was moved almost to tears by
pity. Her emotion was specifically directed toward
her neighbour, tearing down his home, board by board, .
at a time when there was so much unavoidable destruc-
tion, but undoubtedly she also felt a generalised,
community pity, to say nothing of self-pity. She had
not had an easy time. Her husbarfd, Isawa, had gone
into the army just after Myeko was born, and she had
heard nothing from or of him for a long time, until, on
March 5th, 1942, she received a seven-word telegram:
"Isawa died an honourable death at Singapore."
She learned later that he had died on February 15th,
the day Singapore fell, and that he had been a corporal.
Isawa had not been a particularly prosperous tailor, and
his only capital was a Sankoku sewing machine. After
his death, when his allotments stopped coming, Mrs.
Nakamuru got out the machine and began to take in
piecework herself, and since then had supported the
children, but poorly, by sewing.

As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbour,
everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever
seen. She did not notice what happened to the man
next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion

22 HIROSHIMA

toward her children. She had taken a single step
(the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile,
from the centre of the explosion) when something
picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room
over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of
her house.

Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower
of tiles pommelled her; everything became dark, for she
was buried. The debris did not cover her deeply.
She rose up and freed herself. She heard a child
cry, " Mother, help me ! " and saw her youngest
Myeko, the five-year-old buried up to her breast and
unable to move. As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically
to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear
nothing of her other children.

In the days right before the bombing, Dr. Masakazu
Fujii, being prosperous, hedonistic, and, at the time
not too busy, had been allowing himself the luxury of
sleeping until nine or nine-thirty, but fortunately he
had to get up early the morning the bomb was dropped
to see a house guest off on a train. He rose at six,
and half an hour later walked with his friend to the
station, not far away, across two of the rivers. He was
back home by seven, just as the siren sounded its
sustained warning. He ate breakfast and then,
because the morning was already hot, undressed down
to his underwear and went out on the porch to read
the paper. This porch in fact, the whole building-
was curiously constructed. Dr. Fujii was the proprietor
of a peculiarly Japanese institution, a private, single-
doctor hospital. This building, perched beside and
over the water of the Kyo River, and next to the bridge

A NOISELESS FLASH 23

of the same name, contained thirty rooms for thirty
patients and their kinsfolk for, according to Japanese
custom, when a person falls sick and goes to a hospital,
one or more members of his family go and live there
with him, to cook for him, bathe, massage, and read
to him, and to offer incessant familial sympathy,
without which a Japanese patient would be miserable
indeed. Dr. Fujii had no beds only straw mats for
his patients. He did, however, have all sorts of modern
equipment: an X-ray machine, diathermy apparatus,
and a fine tiled laboratory. The structure rested
two-thirds on the land, one-third on piles over the
tidal waters of the Kyo. This overhang, the part of
the building where Dr. Fujii lived, was queer-looking, but
it was cool in summer and from the porch, which
faced away from the centfe of the city, the prospect
of the river, with pleasure boats drifting up and down it,
was always refreshing. Dr. Fujii had occasionally had
anxious moments when the Ota and its mouth branches
rose to flood, but the piling was apparently firm enough
and the house had always held.

Dr. Fujii had been relatively idle for about a month
because in July, as the number of untouched cities in
Japan dwindled and as Hiroshima seemed more and
more inevitably a target, he began turning patients
away, on the ground that in case of a fire raid he would
not be able to evacuate them. Now he had only two
patients left a woman from Yano, injured in the
shoulder, and a young man of twenty-five recovering
from burns he had suffered when the steel factory near
Hiroshima in which he worked had been hit. Dr.
Fujii had six nurses to tend his patients. His wife and

24 HIROSHIMA

children were safe; his wife and one son were living
outside Osaka, and another son and two daughters
were in the country on Kyushu. A niece was living
with him, and a maid and a manservant. He had little
to do and did not mind, for he had saved some money.
At fifty he was healthy, convivial, and calm, and he was
pleased to pass the evenings drinking whisky with
friends, always sensibly and for the sake of conversa-
tion. Before the war, he had affected brands imported
from Scotland and America; now he was perfectly
satisfied with the best Japanese brand, Suntory.

Dr. Fujii sat down cross-legged in his underwear on
the spotless matting of the porch, put on his glasses,
and started reading the Osaka Asahi. He liked to read
the Osaka news because his wife was there. He saw
the flash. To him faced away from the centre and
looking at his paper it seemed a brilliant yellow.
Startled, he began to rise to his feet. In that moment
(he was 1,550 yards from the centre), the hospital leaned
behind his rising and, with a terrible ripping noise,
toppled into the river. The Doctor, still in the act of
getting to his feet, was thrown forward and around and
over; he was buffetted and gripped; he lost track of
everything, because things were so speeded up ; he felt
the water.

Dr. Fujii hardly had time to think that he was dying
before he realized that he was alive, squeezed tightly
by two long timbers in a V across his chest, like a
morsel suspended between two huge chopsticksheld
upright, so that he could not move, with his head
miraculously above water and his torso and legs in it
The remains of his hospital were all around him in a

A NOISELESS FLASH 25

mad assortment of splintered lumber and materials for
the relief of pain. His left shoulder hurt terribly. His
glasses were gone.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, of the Society of Jesus,
was, on the morning of the explosion, in rather frail
condition. The Japanese war-time diet had not sus-
tained him, and he felt the strain of being a foreigner
in an increasingly xenophobic Japan ; even a German,
since the defeat of the Fatherland, was unpopular.
Father Kleinsorge had, at thirty-eight, the look of a
boy growing too fast thin in the face, with a prominent
Adam's apple, a hollow chest, dangling hands, big feet.
'He walked clumsily, leaning forward a little. He was
tired all the time. To make matters worse, he had
suffered for two^ days, along with Father Cieslik, a
fellow-priest, from a rather painful and urgent
diarrhoea, which they blamed on the beans and black
ration bread they were obliged to eat. Two other
priests then living in the mission compound, which
was in the Nobori-cho section Father Superior LaSalle
and Father Schifier had happily escaped this affliction.

Father Kleinsorge woke up about six the morning
the bomb was dropped, and half-an-hour later he was
a bit tardy because of his sickness he began to read
Mass in the mission chapel, a small Japanese-style
wooden building which was without pews, since its
worshippers knelt on the usual Japanese matted floor,
facing an altar graced with splendid silks, brass, silver,
and heavy embroideries. This morning, a Monday,
the only worshippers were Mr. Takemoto, a theological
student living in the mission house; Mr. Fukai, the
secretary of the diocese; Mrs. Murata, the mission's

26 HIROSHIMA

devoutly Christian housekeeper ; and his fellow-priests.
After Mass, while Father Kleinsorge was reading the
Prayers of Thanksgiving, the siren sounded. He stopped
th6 service and the missionaries retired across the
compound to the bigger building. There, in his room
on the ground floor, to the right of the front door,
Father Kleinsorge changed into a military liniform
which he had acquired when he was teaching at the
Rokko Middle School in Kobe and which he wore
during air-raid alerts.

After an alarm, Father Kleinsorge always went out
and scanned the sky, and this time, when he stepped
outside, he was glad to see only the single weather
plane that flew over Hiroshima each day about this
time. Satisfied that nothing would happen, he went in
and breakfasted with the other Fathers on substitute
coffee and ration bread, which, under the circumstances,
was especially repugnant to him. The Fathers sat and
talked a whiJe, until, at eight, they heard the all-clear.
They went then to various parts of the building.
Father Schiffcr retired to his room to do some writing.
Father Cieslik sat in his room in a straight chair with
a pillow over his stomach to ease his pain, and read.
Father Superior LaSalle stood at the window of his
room, thinking. Father Kleinsorge went up to a room
on the third floor, took off all his clothes except his
underwear, and stretched out on his right side on a
cot and began reading his Stimmen der Zeit.

After the terrible flash which, Father Kleinsorge
later realized, reminded him of something he had read
as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth
he bad time (since he was 1,400 yards from the

A NOISELESS FLASH 27

centre) for one thought: A bomb has fallen directly
on us. Then, for a few seconds or minutes, he went
out of his mind.

Father Kleinsorge never knew how he got out of
the hbuse. " The next things he was conscious of were
that he was wandering around in the mission's vege-
table garden in his underwear, bleeding slightly from
small cuts along his left flank; that all the buildings
round about had fallen down except the Jesuits'
mission house, which had long before been braced
and double-braced by a priest named Gropper, who
was terrified of earthquakes ; that the day had turned
dark; and that Murata-sa/i, the housekeeper, was
near by, crying over and over, " Shu Jesusu, awaremi
tamai I Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us !"

On the train on the way into Hiroshima from the
country, where he lived with his mother, Dr. Terufumi
Sasaki, the Red Cross Hospital surgeon, thought over
an unpleasant nightmare he had had the night before.
His mother's horrife was in Mukaihara, thirty miles
from the city, and it took him two hours by train and
tram to reach the hospital. He had slept uneasily all
night and had wakened an hour earlier than usual,
and, feeling sluggish and slightly feverish, had debated
whether to go to the hospital at all ;his sense of duty
finally forced him to go, and he had started out on an
earlier train than he took most mornings. The dream
had particularly frightened him because it was so
closely associated, on the surface at least, with a dis-
turbing actuality. He was only twenty-five years old
and had just completed his training at the Eastern
Medical University, in Tsingtao, China. He was some-

28 HIROSHIMA

thing of an idealist and was much distressed by the
inadequacy of medical facilities in the country town
where his mother lived. Quite on his own, and without
a permit, he had begun visiting a few sick people out
there in the evenings, after his eight hours at the
hospital and four hours' commuting. He had recently
learned that the penalty for practising without a
permit was severe; a fellow-doctor whom he had asked
about it had given him a serious scolding. Nevertheless,
he had continued to practise. In his dream, he had
been at the bedside of a country patient when the
police and the doctor he had consulted burst into the
room, seized him, dragged him outside, and beat him
up cruelly. On the train, he just about decided to give
up the work in Mukaihara7 since he felt it would be
impossible to get a permit, because the authorities
would hold that it would conflict with his duties at
the Red Cross Hospital.

At the terminus, he caught a street-car at once. (He
later calculated that if he had taken his customary
train that morning, and if he had had to wait a few
minutes for the street-car, as often happened, he would
have been close to the centre at the time of the explosion
and would surely have perished.) He arrived at the
hospital at seven-forty and reported to the chief
surgeon. A few minutes later, he went to a room on
the first floor and drew blopd from the arm off a man
in order to perforjn a Wassermann test. The laboratory
containing the incubators for the test was on the third
floor. With the blood specimen in his left hand,
walking in a kind of distraction he had felt all morning,
probably because of the dream and his restless night,

A NOISELESS FLASH 29

he started along the main corridor on his way toward
the stairs. He was one step beyond an open window
when the light of the bomb was reflected, like a gigantic
photographic flash, in the corridor. He ducked down
on one knee and said to himself, as only a Japanese
would, " Sasaki, gambare / Be brave !" Just then
(the building was 1,650 yards from the centre), the
blast ripped through the hospital. The glasses he was
wearing flew off his face; the bottle of blood crashed
against one wall ; his Japanese slippers zipped out from
under his feet but otherwise, thanks to where he
stood, he was untouched.

Dr. Sasaki shouted the name of the chief surgeon
and rushed around to the man's office and found him
terribly cut by glass. The hospital was in horrible
confusion : heavy partitions and ceilings had fallen on
patients, beds had overturned, windows had blown in
and cut people, blood was spattered on the walls and
floors, instruments were everywhere, many of the
patients were running about screaming, many more
lay dead. (A colleague working in the laboratory to
which Dr. Sasaki had been walking was dead; Dr.
Sasaki's patient, whom he had just left and who a few
moments before had been dreadfully afraid of syphilis,
was also dead.) Dr. Sasaki found himself the only
doctor in the hospital who was unhurt.

Dr. Sasaki, who believed that the enemy had hit
only the building he was in, got bandages and began
to bind the wounds of those inside the hospital ; while
outside, all over Hiroshima, maimed and dying
citizens turned their unsteady steps toward the Red
Cross Hospital to begin an invasion that was to make

30 HIROSHIMA

Dr. Sasaki forget his private nightmare for a long,
long time.

Miss Toshiko Sasaki, the East Asia Tin Works
clerk, who is not related to Dr. Sasaki, got up at three
o'clock in the morning on the day the bomb fell.
There was extra housework to do. Her eleven-month-
old brother, Akio, had come down the day before with
a serious stomach upset; her mother had taken him
to the Tamura Pcdiatric Hospital and was staying there
with him. Miss Sasaki, who was about twenty, had to
cook breakfast for her father, a brother, a sister, and
herself, and since the hospital, because of the war,
was unable to provide food to prepare a whole day's
meals TFor her mother and the baby, in time for her
father, who worked in a factory making rubber ear-
plugs for artillery crews, to take the food by on his
way to the plant. When she had finished and had
cleaned and put away the cooking things, it was nearly
seven. The family lived in Koi, and she had a forty-
five-minute trip to the tin works, in the section of town
called Kannon-machi. She was in charge of the
personnel records in the factory. She left Koi at seven,
and as soon as she reached the plant, she went with
some of the other girls from the personnel department
to the factory auditorium. A prominent local Navy
man, a former employee, had committed suicide the
day before by throwing himself under a train a death
considered honourable enough to warrant a memorial
service, which was to be held at the tin works at ten
o'clock that morning. In the large hall, Miss Salaki
and the others made suitable preparations for the
meeting. This work took about twenty minutes.

A NOISELESS FLASH 31

Miss Sasaki went back to her office and sat down at
her desk. She was quite far from the windows, which
were off to her left, and behind her were.-a couple of
tall bookcases containing all the books of the factory
library, which the personnel department had organized.
She settled herself at her desk, put some things in a
drawer, and shifted papers. She thought that before
she began to make entries in her lists of new employees,
discharges, and departures for the Army, she would
chat for a moment with the girl at her right. Just as
she turned her head away from the windows, the room
was filled with a blinding light. She was paralyzed by
fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment (the
plant was 1,600 yards from the centre).

Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness.
The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor
above collapsed in splinters and the people up there
came down and the roof above them gave way ; but
principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind
her swooped forward and the contents threw her down,
with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking under-
neath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment
ofjihe atomic age, a human being was crushed by
~books.

II

THE FIRE

IMMEDIATELY after the explosion, the Reverend Mr.
Kiyoshi Tanimoto, having run wildly out of the
Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at
the bloody soldiers at the mouth of the dugout they
had been digging, attached himself sympathetically to
an old lady who was walking along in a daze, holding
her had with her left hand, supporting a small boy of
three or four on her back with her right, and crying,
" I'm hurt ! I'm hurt ! I'm hurt !" Mr. Tanimoto
transferred the child to his own back and led the
woman by the hand down the street, which was
darkened by what seemed to be a local column of dust.
He took the woman to a grammar school not far away
that had previously been designated for use as a
temporary hospital in' case of emergency. By this
solicitous behaviour, Mr. Tanimoto at once got rid
of his terror. At the school, he was much surprised to
see glass all over the floor and fifty or sixty injured
people already waiting to be treated. He reflected that,
although the all-clear had sounded and he had heard
no planes, several bombs must have been dropped.
He thought of a hillock in the rayon man's garden
from which he could get a view of the whole of Koi
of the whole of Hiroshima, for that matterand he
ran back up to the estate.

From the mound, Mr. Tanimoto saw an astonishing
panorama. Not just a patch of Koi, as he had expected,
but as much of Hiroshima as he could see through the
clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma.

'THE FIRE 33

Clumps of smoke, near and tar, had begun to push
up through the general dust. He wondered how such
extensive damage could have been dealt out of a silent
sky ; even a few planes, far 3 up, would have been
audible. Houses nearby were burning, and when huge
drops of water 'the size of marbles began to fall, he
half thought that they must be coming from the hoses
of firemen fighting the blazes. (They were actually
drops of condensed moisture falling from the turbulent
tower of dust, heat, and fission fragments, that had
already risen miles into the sky above Hiroshima.)

Mr. Tanimoto turned away from the sight when he
heard Mr. Matsuo call out to ask whether he was all
right. Mr. Matsuo had been safely cushioned within
the falling house by the bedding stored in the front hall
and had worked his way out. Mr. Tanimoto scarcely
answered. He had thought of his wife and baby, his
church, his home, his parishioners, all of them down
in that awful murk. Once more he began to run in
fear toward the city.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the tailor's widow, having
struggled up from under the ruins of her house after
the explosion, and seeing Myeko, the youngest of her
three children, buried breast-deep and unable to move,
crawled across the debris, hauled at timbers, and flung
tiles aside, in a hurried effort to free the child. Then,
from what seemed to be caverns far below, she heard
two small voices crying, " Tasukete ! Tasukete I
"Help! Help!"

She called the names of her ten-year-old son and
eight-year-old daughter: "Toshio i Yaeko 1"

The voices from below answered.

34 . HIROSHIMA

Mrs. Nakamura abandoned Myeko, who at least
could breathe, and in a frenzy made the wreckage fly
above the crying voices. The children had been sleeping
nearly ten feet apart, but now their voices seemed to
come from the same place. Toshio, the boy, apparently
had some freedom to move, because she could feel
him undermining the pile of wood and tiles as she
worked from above. At last she saw his head, and she
hastily pulled him out by it. A mosquito net was
wound intricately, as if it had been carefully wrapped,
around his feet. He said he had been blown right
across the room and had been on top of his sister,
Yaeko under the wreckage. She now said, from under-
neath, that she could not move, because there was
something on her legs. With a bit more digging,
Mrs. Nakamura cleared a hole above the child and
began to pull her arm. " Itai I It hurts !" Yaeko
cried. Mrs. Nakamura shouted, " There's no time now
to say whether it hurts or not," and yanked her whim-
pering daughter up. Then she freed Myeko. The
children were filthy and bruised, but none of them had
a single cut or scratch.

Mrs. Nakamura took the children out into the
street. They had nothing on but underpants, and
although the day was very hot, she worried rather
confusedly about their being cold, so she went back
into the wreckage and burrowed underneath and found
a bundle of clothes she had packed for an emergency,
and she dressed them in pants, blouses, shoes a padded-
cotton air-raid helmets called bokuzuki, and even,
irrationally, overcoats. The children were silent^ except
for the five-year-old, Myeko, who kept asking questions :

THE FIRE 35

" Why is it night already ? Why did our house fall
down ? What happened ?" Mrs. Nakamura, who did
not know what had happened (had not the all-clear
sounded ?), looked around and saw through the dark-
ness that all the houses in her neighbourhood had
collapsed. The house next door, which its owner had
been tearing down to make way for a fire lane, was now
very thoroughly, if crudely, torn down; its owner,
who had been sacrificing his home for the community's
safety, lay dead. Mrs. Nakamoto, wife of the head of
the local air-raid defence Neighbourhood Association,
came across the street with her head all bloody, and
said that her baby was badly cut ; did Mrs. Nakamura
have any bandage ? Mrs. Nakamura did not, but she
crawled into the remains of her house again and pulled
out some white cloth that she had been using in her
work as a seamstress, ripped it into strips, and gave
it to Mrs. Nakamoto. While fetching the cloth, she
noticed her sewing machine; she went back in for it
and dragged it out. Obviously, she could not carry
it with her, so she unthinkingly plunged her symbol
of livelihood into the receptacle which for weeks had
been her symbol of safety the cement tank of water
in front of her house, of the type every household had
been ordered to construct against a possible fire raid.
A nervous neighbour, Mrs. Hataya, called to Mrs.
Nakamura to run away with herjo the woods in Asano
Park an estate by the Kyo River not far off, belonging
to the wealthy Asano family/ who once owned the
Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line. The park had been
designated as an evacuation area for their neighbour-
hood. Seeing fire breaking out in a nearby ruin (except

36 HIROSHIMA

at the very centre, where the bomb itself ignited some
fires, most of Hiroshima's citywide conflagration was
caused by inflammable wreckage falling on cook-
stoves and live wires), Mrs. Nakamura suggested going
over to fight it. Mrs. Hataya said, " Don't be foolish.
What if planes come and drop more bombs ?" So
Mrs. Nakamura started out for Asano Park with her
children and Mrs. Hataya, and she carried her ruck-
sack of emergency clothing, a blanket, an umbrella,
and a suitcase of things she had cached in her air-raid
shelter. Under many ruins, as they hurried along, they
heard muffled screams for help. The only building
they saw standing on their way to Asano Park was the
Jesuit mission house, alongside the Catholic kinder-
garten to which Mrs. Nakamura had sent Myeko for
a time. As they passed it, she saw Father Kleinsorge,
in bloody underwear, running out of the house with
a small suitcase in his hand.

Right after the explosion, while Father Wilhelm
Kleinsorge, S. J., was wandering around in his under-
wear in the vegetable garden, Father Superior LaSalle
came around the corner of the building in the darkness.
His body, especially his back, was bloody; the flash'
had made him twist away from his window, and tiny
pieces of glass had flown at him. Father Kleinsorge,
still bewildered, managed to ask, " Where are the rest ?"
Just then, the two other priests living in the mission
house appearedFather Cieslik, unhurt, supporting
Father Schifier, who was covered with blood that
spurted from a cut above his left ear and who was
very pale. Father Cieslik was rather pleased with
himself, for after the flash he, had dived into a doorway,

THE FIRE 37

which he had previously reckoned to be the safest
place inside the building, and when the blast came, he
was not injured. Father LaSalle told Father Cieslik to
take Father Schiffer to a doctor before he bled to death,
and suggested either Dr. Kanda, who lived on the next
corner, or Dr. Fujii, about six blocks away. The two
men went out of the compound and up the street.

The daughter of Mr. Hoshijima, the mission catechist,
ran up to Father Kleinsorge and said that her mother
and sister were buried under the ruins of their house,
which was at the back of the Jesuit compound, and at
the same time the priests noticed that the house of the
Catholic-kindergarten teacher at the foot of the com-
pound had collapsed on her. While Father LaSalle
and Mrs. Murata, the mission housekeeper, dug the
teacher out, Father Kleinsorge went to the catechist's
fallen house and began lifting things off the top of
the pile. There was not a sound underneath ; he was
sure the Hoshijima women had been killed. At last,
under what had been a corner of the kitchen, he saw
Mrs. Hoshijima's head. Believing her dead, he began
to haul her out by the hair, but suddenly she screamed,
" Itai ! Itai / It hurts ! It hurts !" He dug some
more and lifted her out. He managed, too, to find her
daughter in the rubble and free her. Neither was
badly hurt.

A public bath next door to the mission house had
caught fire, but since there the wind was southerly,
the priests thought their house would be spared.
Nevertheless, as a precaution, Father Kleinsorge went
inside to fetch some things he wanted to save. He
found his room in a state of weird and illogical con-

38 HIROSHIMA

fusion. A first-aid kit was hanging undisturbed on a
hook on the wall, but his clothes, which had been on
other hooks nearby, were nowhere to be seen. His
desk was in splinters all over the room, but a mere
papier-mache suitcase, which he had hidden under the
desk, stood handle-side up, without a scratch on it,
in the doorway of the room, where he could not miss
it. Father Kleinsorge later came to regard this as a
bit of Providential interference, inasmuch as the suit-
case contained his breviary, the account books for the
whole diocese, and a considerable amount of paper
money belonging to the mission, for which he was
responsible. He ran out of the house and deposited
the suitcase in the mission air-raid shelter.

At about this time, Father Cieslik and Father
Schiffer, who was still spurting blood, came back and
said that Dr. Kanda's house was ruined and that fire
blocked them from getting out of what they supposed
to be the local circle of destruction to Dr. Fujii's
private hospital, on the bank of the Kyo River.

Dr. MasaKazu Fujii's hospital was no longer on the
bank of the Kyo River; it was in the river. After
the overturn, Dr. Fujii was so stupefied and so tightly
squeezed by the beams gripping his chest that he was
unajble to move at first, and he hung there about
twenty minutes in the darkened morning. Then a
thought which came to him that soon the tide would
be running in through the estuaries and his head would
be submerged inspired him to fearful activity; he
wriggled and turned and exerted what strength he
could (though his left arm, because of the pain in his
shoulder, was useless), and before long he had freed

THE FIRE 39

himself from the vice. After a few moments' rest, he
climbed on to the pile of timbers and, finding a long
one that slanted up to the river bank, he painfully
shinnied up it. c

Dr. Fujii, who was in his underwear, was now
soaking and dirty. His undershirt was torn, and blood
ran down it from bad cuts on his chin and back. In
this disarray, he walked out onto Kyo Bridge, beside
which his hospital had stood. The bridge had not
collapsed. He could see only fuzzily without his
glasses, but he could see enough to be amazed at
the number of houses that were down all around. On
the bridge, he encountered a friend, a doctor named
Machii, and asked in bewilderment, "What do you
think it was?"

Dr. Machii said, " It must have been a Molotoffano
hanakago" a Molotov flower basket, the delicate
Japanese name for the " bread basket," or self-
scattering cluster of bombs.

At first, Dr. Fujii could se^only two fires, one across
the river from his hospital site and one quite far to
the south. 'But at the same time, he and his friend
observed something that puzzled them, and which, as
doctors, they discussed: although there were as yet
very few fires, wounded people were hurrying across
the bridge in an endless parade of misery, and many
of them exhibited terrible burns on their faces and
arms. " Why do you suppose it is ?" Dr. Fujii asked.
Even a theory was comforting that day, and Dr. Machii
stuck to his. "Perhaps because it was a Molotov
flower basket," he said.

There had been no breeze earlier in the morning

40 HIROSHIMA

when Dr. Fujii had walked to the railway station to
see a friend off, but now brisk winds were blowing
every which way; here on the bridge the wind was
easterly. New fires were leaping up, and they spread
quickly, and in a very short time terrible blasts of hot
air and showers of cinders made it impossible to stand
on the bridge any more. Dr. Machii ran to the far
side of the river and along a still unkindled street.
Dr. Fujii went down into the water under the bridge,
where a score of people had already taken refuge,
among them his servants, who had extricated them-
selves from the wreckage. From there, Dr. Fujii saw
a nurse hanging in the timbers of his hospital by her
legs, and then another painfully pinned across the
breast. He enlisted the help of some of the others
under the bridge and freed both of them. He thought
he heard the voice of his niece for a moment, but he
could not find her; he never saw her again. Four
of his nurses and the two patients in the hospital died,
too. Dr. Fujii went ba^Jt into the water of the river
and waited for the fire to subside.

The lot of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after
the explosion and, as these three were typical, that
of the majority of the physicians and surgeons of
Hiroshima with their offices and hospitals destroyed,
their equipment scattered, their own bodies incapaci-
tated in varying degrees, explained why so many citizens
who were hurt went untended and why so many who
might have lived died. Of a hundred and fifty doctors"
in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of
the rest were wounded. Of 1,789 nurses, 1,654 were
dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital,

THE FIRE 41

that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty
were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more
than two hundred. The sole uninjured doctor on the
Red Cross Hospital staff was Dr. Sasaki. After the
explosion, he hurried to a storeroom to fetch bandages.
This room, like everything he had seen as he ran
through the hospital, was chaotic bottles of medicines
thrown off shelves and broken, salves spattered on
the walls, instruments strewn everywhere. He grabbed
up some bandages and an unbroken bottle of mercuro-
chrome, hurried back to the chief surgeon, and
bandaged his cuts. Then he went out into the corridor
and began patching up the wounded patients and the
doctors and nurses there. He blundered so without
his glasses that he took a pair off the face of a wounded
nurse, and although they only approximately com-
pensated for the errors of his vision, they were better
than "nothing. (He was to depend on them for more
than a month.)

Dr. Sasaki worked without method, taking* those
who were nearest him first, and he noticed soon that
the corridor seemed to be getting more and more
crowded. Mixed in with the abrasions and lacerations
which most people in the hospital had suffered, he
began to find dreadful burns. He realized then that
casualties were pouring in from outdoors. There were
so many that he began to pass up the tightly wounded ;
he decided that all he could hope to do was to stop
people from bleeding to death. Before long, patients
lay and croucjied on the floors of the wards and the
laboratories and all the other rooms, and in the
corridors, and on the stairs, and in the front hall, and

42 HIROSHIMA

under the porte-cochere, and on the stone front steps,
and in the driveway and courtyard, and for blocks
each way in the streets outside. Wounded people
supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned
together. Many people were vomiting. A tremendous
number of schoolgirls some of those who had been
taken from their classrooms to work outdoors, clearing
fire Ian6s crept into the hospital. In a city of two
hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred
thousand people had been killed or doomed at one
blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least
ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the
best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to
such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds,
and they had all been occupied. The people in the
suffocating crowd inside the hospital wept and cried,
for Dr. Sasaki to hear, " Sensei ! Doctor 1" and the
less seriously wounded came and pulled at his*sleeve
and begged him to come to the aid of the worse
wounded. Tugged here and there in his stockinged
feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much
raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of profession and
stopped working as a skilful surgeon and a sympathetic
man ; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping,
daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding.

Some of the wounded in Hiroshima were unable to
enjoy the questionable luxury of hospitalisation. In
what had been the personnel office of the East Asia
Tin Works, Miss Sasaki lay doubled over, unconscious,
under the tremendous pile of books and plaster and
wood and corrugated iron. She was wholly unconscious
(she later estimated) for about three hours. Her first

THE FIRE 43

sensation was of dreadful pain in her left leg. It was
so black under the books and debris that the borderline
between awareness and unconsciousness was fine;
she apparently crossed it several times, for the pain
seemed to come and go. At the moments when it was
sharpest, she felt that her leg had been cut off some-
where below the knee. Later, she heard someone
walking on top of the wreckage above her, and
anguished voices spoke up, evidently from within the
mess around her: " Please help ! Get us out !"

Father Kleinsorge stemmed Father Schiffer's spurting
cut as well as he could with some bandage that Dr.
Fujii had given the priests a few days before. When
he finished, he ran into the mission house again and
found the jacket of his military uniform and an old
pair of grey trousers. He put them on and went
outside. A woman from next door ran up to him and
shouted that her husband was buried under her house
and the house was on fire; Father Kleinsorge must
come and save him.

Father Kleinsorge, already growing apathetic and
dazed in the presence of the cumulative distress, said,
"We haven't much time." Houses all around were
burning, and the wind was now blowing hard. " Do
you know exactly which part of the house he is under ?"
he asked.

" Yes, yes," she said. " Come quickly."

They went around to the house, the remains of
which blazed violently, but when they got there, it
turned out that the woman had no idea where her
husband was. Father Kleinsorge shouted several
times, "Is anyone there?" There was no answer.

44 HIROSHIMA

Father Kleinsorge said to the woman, " We must get
away or we will all die." He went back to the Catholic
compound and told the Father Superior that the fire
was coming closer on the wind, which had swung
around and was now from the north ; it was time for
everybody to go.

Just then, the kindergarten teacher pointed out to
the priests Mr. Fukai, the secretary of the diocese,, who
was standing in his window on the second floor of the
mission house, facing in the direction of the explosion,
weeping. Father Cieslik, because he thought the stairs
unusable, ran around to the back of the mission hcfuse
to look for a ladder. There he heard people crying for
help under a-nearby fallen roof. He called to passers-by
running away in the street to help him lift it, but
nobody paid any attention, and he had to leave the
buried ones to die. Father Kleinsorge ran inside the
mission house and scrambled up the stairs, which were
awry and piled with plaster and lathing, and called
to Mr. Fukai from the doorway of his room.

Mr. Fukai, a very short man of about fifty, turned
around slowly, with a queer look, and said, " Leave
me here.*'

Father Kleinsorge went into the room and took
Mr. Fukai by the collar of his coat and said, " Come
with me or you'll die."

Mr. Fukai said, " Leave me here to die."

Father Kleinsorge began to shove and haul Mr.
Fukai out of the room. Then the theological student
came up and grabbed Mr. Fukai's feet, and Father
Kleinsorge took his shoulders, and together they
carried him downstairs and outdoors. " I can't walk 1"

THE FIRE 45

Mr. Fukai cried. " Leave me here !" Father Kleinsorge
got his paper suitcase with the money in it and took
Mr. Fukai up pick-a-back, and the party started for
the East Parade Ground, their district's " safe a<rea."
As they went out of the gate, Mr. Fukai, quite child-
like now, beat on Father Kleinsorge's shoulders a,nd
said, " I won't leave. I won't leave." Irrelevantly,
Father Kleinsorge turned to Father LaSalle and said,
" We have lost all our possessions but not our sense
of humour."

The street was cluttered with parts t>f houses that
had slid into it, and with fallen telephone poles and
wires. From every second or third house came the
voices of people buried and abandoned, who invariably
screamed, with formal politeness, " Tasukete kure !
Help, if you please !" The priests recognised several
ruins from which these cries came as the homes of
friends, but because of the fire it was too late to help.
All the way, Mr. Fukai whimpered, " Let me stay."
The party turned right when they came to a block of
fallen houses that was one flame. At Sakai Bridge,
which would take them across to the East Parade
Ground, they saw that the whole community on the
opposite side of the river was a sheet of fire; they
dared not cross and decided to take refuge in Asano
Park, off to their left. Father Kleinsorge, who had
been weakened for a couple of days by his bad case
of diarrhoea, began to stagger under his protesting
burden, and as he tried to climb up over the wreckage
of several houses that blocked their way to the park,
he stumbled, dropped Mr. Fukai, and plunged down,
head over heels, to the edge of the river. When he

46 HIROSHIMA

picked himself up, he saw Mr. Fukai running away.
Father Kleinsorge shouted to a dozen soldiers, who
were standing by the bridge, to stop him. As Father
Kleinsorge started back to get Mr. Fukai, Father
L^Salle called out, " Hurry ! Don't waste time I" So
Father Kleinsorge just requested the soldiers to take
care of Mr. Fukai. They said they would, but the
little, broken man got away from them, and the last
the priests could see of him, he was running back
toward the fire.

Mr. Tanimoto, fearful for his family and church,
at first ran toward them by the shortest route, along
Koi Highway. He was the only person making his
way into the city ; Jjje met hundreds and hundreds who
were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be
hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned
off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others,
because of pafti, held their arms up as if carrying
something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they
walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing.
On some undressed bodies, the burns had made
patterns of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on
the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat
from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and
conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they
had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured
themselves, supported relatives who were worse off.
Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight
ahead, were silent, and showed no expression what-
ever. ,

After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge,
having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he

THE FIRE 47

approached the centre, that all the houses had been
crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were
bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several
points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always
stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed
for help, but no one helped ; in general, survivors that
day assisted only their relatives or immediate neigh-
bours, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a
wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the
screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them. As a
Christian he was filled with compassion for those who
were trapped, and as a Japanese he was overwhelmed
by the shame of being unhurt, and he prayed as he
ran, " God help them and take them out of the fire."
He thought he would skirt the fire, to the left. He
ran back to Kannon Bridge and followed for a distance
one of the rivers. He tried several cross streets, but all
were blocked, so he turned far left and ran out to
Yokogawa, a station on a railroad line that detoured
the city in a wide semi-circle, and he followed the rails
until he came to a burning train. So impressed was he
by this time by the extent of the damage that he ran
north two miles to Gion, a suburb in the foothills.
All the way, he overtook dreadfully burned and
lacerated people, and in his guilt he turned to right
and left as he hurried and said to some of them,
" Excuse me for having no burden like yours." Near
Gion, he began to meet country people going toward
the city to help, and when they saw him, several
exclaimed, " Look ! There is one who is not wounded."
At Gion, he bore toward the right bank of the main
river, the Ota, and ran down it until he reached fire

48 HIROSHIMA

again. There was no fire on the other side of the river,
so he threw off his shirt and shoes and plunged into it.
!n midstream, where the current was fairly strong,
exhaustion and fear finally caught up with him he had
run nearly seven miles and he became limp and drifted
in the water. He prayed, " Please, God, help me to
cross. It would be nonsense for me to be drowned
when I am the only uninjured one.*' He managed a
few more strokes and fetched up on a spit downstream.

Mr. Tanimoto climbed up the bank and ran along
it until, near a large Shinto shrine, he came to more
fire, and as he turned left to get around it, he met, by
incredible luck, his wife. She was carrying their infant
son. Mr. Tanimoto was now so emotionally worn out
that nothing could surprise him. He did not embrace
his wife; he simply said, " Oh, you are safe." She told
him that she had got home from her night in Ushida
just in time for the explosion; she had been buried
under the parsonage with the baby in her arms. She
told how the wreckage had pressed down on her, how
the baby had cried. She saw a chink of light, and by
reaching up with a hand, she worked the hole bigger,
bit by bit. After about half-an-hour, she heard the
crackling noise of wood burning. At last the opening
was big enough for her to push the baby out, and
afterward she crawled out herself. She said she was
now going out to Ushida again. Mr. Tanimoto said he
wanted to see his church and take care of the people
of his Neighbourhood Association. They parted as
casually as bewildered as they had met.

Mr. Tanimoto's way around the fire took him across
the East Parade Ground, which, being an evacuation

THE FIRE 49

area, was now the scene of a gruesome review: rank
on rank of the burned and bleeding. Those who were
burned moaned, " Mizu, mizu ! Water, water !" Mr.
Tanimoto found a basin in a near-by street and located
a water tap that still worked in the crushed shell of a
house, and he began carrying water to the suffering
strangers. When he had given drink to about thirty of
them, he realised he was taking too much time.
" Excuse me," he said loudly to those near by who were
reaching out their hands to him and crying their thirst.
" I have many people to take care of." Then he ran
away. He went to the river again, the basin in his
hand, and jumped down on to a sandspit. There he
saw hundreds of people so badly wounded that they
could not get up to go farther from the burning city.
When they saw a man erect and unhurt, the chant
began again: "Mizu, mizu, mizu." Mr. Tanimoto
could not resist them ; he carried them water from the
river a mistake, since it was tidal and brackish. Two
or three small boats were ferrying hurt people across
the river from Asano Park, and when one touched
the spit, Mr. Tanimoto again made his loud, apologetic
speech and jumped into the boat. It took him across
to the park. There, in the underbrush, he found some
of his charges of the Neighbourhood Association, who
had come there by his previous instructions, and saw
many acquaintances, among them Father Kleinsorge
and the other Catholics. But he missed Fukai, who
had been a close friend. " Where is Fukakwz/z?" he
asked.

" He didn't want to come with us," Father Klein-
sorge said. " He ran back."

50 HIROSHIMA

When Miss Sasaki heard the voices of the people
caught along with her in the dilapidation at the tin
factory, she began speaking to them. Her nearest
neighbour, she discovered, was a high-school girl who
had been drafted for factory work, and who said her
back was broken. Miss Sasaki replied, " I am lying
here and I can't move. My left leg is cut off."

Some time later, she again heard somebody walk
overhead and then move off to one side, and whoever
it was began burrowing. The digger released several
people, and when he had uncovered the high-school
girl, she found that her back was not broken, after all,
and she crawled o,ut. Miss Sasaki spoke to the rescuer,
and he worked toward her. He pulled away a great
number of books, until he had made a tunnel to her.
She could see his perspiring face as he said, " Come
out, Miss." She tried. " I can't move," she said. The
man excavated some more and told her to try with all
her strength to get out. But books were heavy on her
hips, and the man finally saw that a bookcase was
leaning on the books and that a heavy beam pressed
down on the bookcase. *" Wait," he said. " I'll get a
crowbar." ,

The man was gone a long time, and when he came
back, he was ill-tempered, as if her plight were all her
fault. " We have no men to help you, " he shouted
in through the tunnel. "You'll have to get out by
yourself."

" That's impossible," she said. " My left leg . . ."
The man went away.

Much later, several men came and dragged Miss
Sasaki out. Her left leg was not severed, but it was

THE FIRE 51

badly broken and cut and it hung askew below the
knee. They took her out into a courtyard. It was
raining. She sat on the ground in the rain. When the
downpour increased, someone directed all the wounded
people to take cover in the factory's air-raid shelters.
" Come along," a torn-up woman said to her. " You
can hop." But Miss Sasaki could not move, and she
just waited in the rain. Then a man propped up a
large sheet of corrugated iron as a kind of lean-to, and
took her in his -arms and carried her to it. She was
grateful until he brought two horribly wounded
people a woman with a whole breast sheared off and
a man whose face was all raw from a burn to share
the simple shed with her. No one came back. The
rain cleared and the cloudy afternoon was hot ; before
nightfall the three grotesques under the slanting piece
of twisted iron began to smell quite bad.

The former head of the Nobori-cho Neighbourhood
Association, to which the Catholic priests belonged,
was an energetic man named Yoshida. He had boasted, .
when he was in charge of the district air-raid defences,
that fire might eat away all of Hiroshima but it would
never come to Nobori-cho. The bomb blew down his
house, and a joist pinned him by the legs, in full view
of the Jesuit mission house across the way and of the
people hurrying along the street. In their confusion as
they hurried past, Mrs. Nakamura, with her children,
and Father Kleinsorge, with Mr. Fukai on his back,
hardly saw him ; he was just part of the general blur
of misery through which they moved. His cries for
help brought no response from them; there were so
many people shouting for help that they could not hear

52 HIROSHIMA

him separately. They and all the others went along.
Nobori-cho became absolutely deserted, and the fire
swept through it. Mr. Yoshida saw the wooden
mission house the only erect building in the area
go up in a lick of flame, and the heat was terrific on
his face. Then flames came along his side of the street
and entered his house. In a paroxysm of terrified
strength, he freed himself and ran down the alleys of
Nobori-cho, hemmed in by the fire he had said would
never come. He began at once to behave like an old
man; two months later his hair was white.

As Dr. Fujii stood in the river up to his neck to
avoid the heat of the fire, the wind grew stronger and
stronger, and soon, even though the expanse of water
was small, the waves grew so high that the people
under the bridge could no longer keep their footing.
Dr. Fujii went close to the shore, crouched down, and
embraced a large stone with his usable arm. Later it
became possible to wade along the very edge of the
river, and Dr. Fujii and his two surviving nurses
moved about two hundred yards upstream, to a sand-
spit near Asano Park. Many wounded were lying on
the sand. Dr. Machii was there with his family; his
daughter, who had been outdoors when the bomb
burst, was badly burned on her hands and legs but
fortunately not on her face. Although Dr. Fujii's
shoulder was by now terribly painful, he examined the
girl's burns curiously. Then he lay down. In spite of
the misery all around, he was ashamed of his appear-
ance, and he remarked to Dr. Machii that he looked
like a beggar, dressed as he was in nothing but torn
and bloody underwear. Late in the afternoon, when

THE FIRE 53

the fire began to subside, he decided to go to his
parental house, in the suburb of Nagatsuka. He asked
Dr. Machii to join him, but the Doctor answered that
he and his family were going to spend the night on the
spit, because of his daughter's injuries. Dr. Fujii,
together with his nurses, walked first to Ushida, where,
in the partially damaged house of some relatives, he
found first-aid materials he had stored there. The two
nurses bandaged him and he them. They went on.
Now not many people walked in the streets, but a
great number sat and lay on the pavement, vomited,
waited for death, and died. The number of corpses
pn the way to Nagatsuka was more and more puzzling.
The Doctor wondered : Could a Molotov flower basket
have done all this ?

Dr. Fujii reached his family's house in the evening.
It was five miles from the centre of town, but its roof
had fallen in and the windows were all broken.

All day, people poured into Asano Park. This
private estate was far enough away from the explosion
so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were
still alive, and the green place invited refugees- partly
because they believed that if the Americans came
back, they would bomb only buildings ; partly because
the foliage seemed a centre of coolness and life, and
the estate's exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their
quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese,
normal, secure; and also partly (according to some
who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic
urge to hide under leaves. Mrs. Nakamura and her
children were among the first to arrive, and they settled
in the bamboo grove near the river. They all felt

54 HIROSHIMA

terribly thirsty, and they drank from the river. At
once they were nauseated and began vomiting, and
they retched the whole day. Others were also nau-
seated; they all thought (probably because of the
strong odour of ionization, an " electric smell " given
off by the bomb's fission) that they were sick from a
gas the Americans had dropped. When Father Klein-
sorge and the other priests came into the park, nodding
to their friends as they passed, the Nakamuras ,were
all sick and prostrate. A woman named Iwasaki, who
lived in the neighbourhood of the mission and who was
sitting near the Nakamuras, got up and asked the
priests if she should stay where she was or go with
them. Father Kleinsorge said, " I hardly know where
the safest place is." She stayed there, and later in the
day, though she had no visible wounds or burns, she
died. The priests went farther along the river and
settled down in some underbrush. Father LaSalle lay
down and went right to sleep. The theological student,
who was wearing slippers, had carried with him a
bundle of clothes, in which he had packed two pairs
of leather shoes. When he sat down with the others,
he found that the bundle had broken open and a
couple of shoes had fallen out and now he had only
two lefts. He retraced his steps and found one right.
When he rejoined the priests, he said, " It's funny,
but things don't matter any more. Yesterday, my
shoes were my most important possessions. To-day,
I don't care. One pair is enough."

Father Cieslik s^id, " I know. I started to bring
my books along, and then I thought, * This is no time
for books.' "

THE FJRH 55

When Mr. Tanimoto, with his basin still in his hand,
reached the park, it was very crowded, and to dis-
tinguish the living from the dead was not easy, for
most of the people lay still, with their eyes open. To
Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the
grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely
wounded suffered together, was one of the most
dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole
experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept,
much less screamed in pain; no one complained;
none of the many who died did so noisily ; not even
the children cried; very few people even spoke. And
when Father Kleinsorge gave water to some whose
faces had been almost blotted out by flash burns, they
took their share and then raised themselves a little
and bowed to him, in thanks.

Mr. Tanimoto greeted the priests and then looked
around for other friends. He saw Mrs. Matsumoto,
wife of the director of the Methodist School, and asked
her if she was thirsty. She was, so he went to one of
the pools in the Asanos' rock gardens and got water
for her in his basin. Then he decided to try to get back
to his church. He \\ent into Nobori-cho by the way
the priests had taken as they escaped, but he did not
get far ; the fire along the streets was so fierce that he
had to turn back. He walked to the river bank and
began to look tor a boat in which he might carry some
of the most severely injured across the river from Asano
Park, and away from the spreading fire. Soon he found
a good-sized pleasure punt drawn up on the bank, but
in and around it was an awful tableau five dead men,
nearly naked, badly burned, who must haye expired more

56 t HIROSHIMA

or less all at once, for they were in attitudes which
suggested that they had been working together to push
the boat down into the river. Mr. Tanimoto lifted
them away from the boat, and as he did so, he exper-
ienced such horror at disturbing the dead preventing
them, he momentarily felt, from launching their craft
and going on their ghostly way that he said out loud,
" Please forgive me for taking this boat. I must use it
for others, who are alive." The punt was heavy, but
he managed to slide it into the water. There were no
oars, and all he could find for propulsion was a thick
bamboo pole. He worked the boat upstream to the
most crowded part of the park and began to ferry the
wounded. He could pack ten or twelve into the boat
for each crossing, but as the river was too deep in the
centre to pole his way across, he had to paddle with
the bamboo, and consequently each trip took a very
long time. He worked several hours that way.

Early in the afternoon, the fire swept into the woods
of Asano Park. The first Mr. Tanimoto knew of it
was when, returning in his boat, he saw that a great
number of people had moved toward the riverside.
On touching the bank, he went up to investigate, and
when he saw the fire* he shouted, "All the young men
who are not badly hurt come with me !" Father
Kleinsorge moved Father Schiffer and Father LaSalle
close to the edge of the river and asked people there
to get them across if the fire came too near, and thei*
joined Tanimoto's volunteers. Mr. Tanimoto sent
some to look for buckets and basins and told others
to beat the burning underbrush with their clothes ;
when utensils were at hand, he formed a bucket chain

THE FIRE 57

from one of the pools in the rock gardens. The team
fought the fire for more than two hours, and gradually
defeated the flames. As Mr. Tanimoto's men worked,
the frightened people in the park pressed closer and
closer to the river, and finally the mob began to force
some of the unfortunates who were on the very bank
into the water. Among those driven into the river and
drowned were Mrs. Matsumoto, of the Methodist
SchQol, and her daughter.

When Father Kleinsorge got back after fighting the
fire, hfe found Father Schiffer still bleeding and terribly
pale. Some Japanese stood around and stared at him,
and Father Schiffer whispered, with a weak smile, "It
is as if I were already dead." " Not yet," Father
Kleinsorge said. He had brought Dr. Fujii's first-aid
kit with him, and he had noticed Dr. Kanda in the
crowd, so he sought him out and asked him if he would
dress Father Schiffer's bad cuts. Dr. Kanda had seen
his wife and daughter dead in the ruins of his hospital ;
he sat now with his head in his hands. " I can't do
anything," he said. Father Kleinsorge bound more
bandage around Father Schiffer's head, moved him to
a steep place, and settled him so that his head was
high, and soon the bleeding diminished.

The roar of approaching planes was heard about
this time. Someone in the crowd near the Nakamura
family shouted, *' It's some Grummans coming to
strafe us !" A baker named Nakashima stood up and
commanded, " Everyone who is wearing anything
white, take it off." Mrs. Nakamura took the blouses
off her children, and opened her umbrella and made
tfiem get under it. A great number of people, even

58 HIROSHIMA

badly burned ones, crawled into bushes and stayed
there until the hum, evidently of a reconnaissance or
weather run, died away.

It began to rain. Mrs. Nakamura kept her children
under the umbrella. The drops grew abnormally
large and someone shouted, " The Americans are
dropping gasoline. They're going to sdt fire to us ! "
(This alarm stemmed from one of the theories being
passed through the park as to why so much of Hiro-
shima had burned: it was that a single plane had
sprayed gasoline on the city and then somehow set
fire to it in one flashing moment.) But the drops were
palpably water, and as they fell, the wind grew stronger
and stronger, and suddenly probably because of the
tremendous convection sej: up by the blazing city a
whirlwind ripped through the park. Huge trees
crashed down; small ones were uprooted and flew
into the air. Higher, a wild array of flat things
revolved in the twisting funnel pieces of iron roofing,
papers, doors, strips of matting. Father Kleinsorge
put a piece of cloth over Father Schiffer's eyes, so that
the feeble man would not think he was going crazy.
The gale blew Mrs. Murata, the mission housekeeper,
who was sitting close by the river, down the embank-
ment at a shallow, rocky place, and she came out with
her bare feet bloody. The vortex moved out on
to the river, where it sucked up a waterspout and
eventually spent itself.

After the storm, Mr. Tanimoto began ferrying
people again, and Father Kleinsorge asked the theo-
logical student to go across and make his way out to
the Jesuit Novitiate at Nagatsuka, about three miles

THE FJRE 59

from the centre of town, and to request the priests
there to come with help for Fathers Schiffer and LaSalle.
The student got into Mr. Tanimoto's boat and went off
with him. Father Kleinsorge asked Mrs. Nakamura
if she would like to go out to Nagatsuka with the
priests when they came. She said she had some
luggage and her children were sick they were still
vomiting from time to time, and so, for that matter,
was she and therefore she feared she could not.
He said he thought the fathers from the Novitiate
could come back the next day with a pushcart to get
her.

Late in the afternoon, when he went ashore for a
while, Mr. Tanimoto, upon whose energy and initiative
many had come to depend, heard people begging for
food. He consulted Father Kleinsorge, and they
decided to go back into town to get some rice from
Mr. Tanimoto's Neighbourhood Association shelter
and from a mission shelter. Father Cieslik and two
or three others went with them. At first, when they
got among the rows of prostrate houses, they did not
know where they were; the change was too sudden,
from a busy city of two hundred and forty-five thousand
that morning to a mere pattern of residue in the after-
noon. The asphalt of the streets was still so soft and
hot from the fires that walking was uncomfortable.
They encountered only one person, a woman, who
said to them as they passed, " My husband is in those
ashes." At the mission, where Mr. Tanimoto left the
party, Father Kleinsorge was dismayed to see the
building razed. In the garden on the way to the
shelter, he noticed a pumpkin roasted on the vine.

60 HIROSHIMA

He and Father Cieslik tasted it and it was good. They
were surprised at their hunger, and they ate quite a bit.
They got out several bags of rice and gathered up
several other cooked pumpkins *and dug up some
potatoes that were nicely baked under the ground,
and started back. Mr. Tanimoto rejoined them on
the way. One of the people with him had some
cooking utensils. In the park, Mr. Tanimoto organ-
ised the lightly wounded women of his neighbourhood
to cook. Father Kleinsorge offered the Nakamura
family some pumpkin, and they tried it, but they
could not keep it on their stomachs. Altogether,
the rice was enough to feed nearly a hundred people.

Just before dark, Mr. Tanimoto came across a
twenty-year-old girl, Mrs. Kamai, the Tanimotos'
next-door neighbour. She was crouching on the
ground with the body of her infant daughter in her
arms. The baby had evidently been dead all day.
Mrs. Kamai jumped up when she saw Mr. Tanimoto
aTnd said, " Would you please try to locate my
husband ? "

Mr. Tanimoto knew that her husband had been
inducted into the Army just the day before; he and
Mrs. Tanimoto had entertained Mrs. Kamai in the
afternoon, to make her forget. Kamai had reported
to the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters near
the ancient castle in the middle of town where some
four thousand troops were stationed. Judging by the
many maimed soldiers Mr. Tanimoto had seen during
the day, he surmised that the barracks had been badly
damaged by whatever it was that had hit Hiroshima.
He knew he hadn't a chance of finding Mrs. Kamai's

THE FIRE 61

husband, even if he searched, but he wanted to humour
her. " I'll try," he said.

" You've got to find him," she said. " He loved
our baby so much. I want him to see her once more."

Ill

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED

EARLY in the evening of the day the bomb exploded,
a Japanese naval launch moved slowly up and down
the seven rivers of Hiroshima. It stopped here and
there to make .an announcement alongside the
crowded sandspits, on which hundreds of wounded
lay; at the bridges, on which others were crowded;
and eventually, as twilight fell, opposite Asano Park.
A young officer stood up in the launch and shouted
through a megaphone, " Be patient ! A naval hospital
ship is coming to take care of you ! " The sight of
the shipshape launch against the background of the
havoc across the river; the unruffled young man in his
neat uniform ; above all, the promise of medical help
the first word of possible succour anyone had heard
in nearly twelve awful hours cheered the people in
the park tremendously. Mrs. Nakamura settled her
family for the night with the assurance that a doctor
would come and stop their retching. Mr. Tanimoto
resumed ferrying the wounded across the river. Father
Kleinsorge lay down and said the Lord's Prayer and a
Hail Mary to himself, and fell right asleep; but no
sooner had he dropped off than Mrs. Murata, the
conscientious mission housekeeper, shook him and
said, " Father Kleinsorge : Did you remember to
repeat your evening prayers ? " He answered rather
grumpily, " Of course," and he tried to go back to
sleep but could not. This, apparently, was just what
Mrs. Murata wanted. She began to chat with the
exhausted priest. One of the questions she raised was

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 63

when he thought the priests from the Novitiate, for
whom he had sent a messenger in mid-afternoon,
would arrive to evacuate Father Superior LaSalle
and Father Schiffer.

The messenger Father Kleinsorge had sent the
theological student who had been living at the mission
house had arrived at the Novitiate, in the hills about
three miles out, at half-past four. The sixteen priests
there had been doing rescue work in the outskirts;
they had worried about their colleagues in the city
but had not known how or where to look for them.
Now they hastily made two litters out of poles and
boards, 'and the student led half a dozen of them
back into the devastated area. They worked their
way along the Ota above the city ; twice the heat of the
fire forced them into the river. At Misasa Bridge,
they encountered a long line of soldiers making a
bizarre forced march away from the the Chugoku
Regional Army Headquarters in the centre of the
town. All were grotesquely burned and they supported
themselves with staves or leaned on one another.
Sick, burned horses, hanging their heads, stood on
the bridge. When the rescue party reached the park
it was after dark, and progress was made extremely
difficult by the tangle of fallen trees of all sizes that
had been knocked down by the whirlwind that after-
noon. At last not long after Mrs. Murata asked her
question they reached their friends, and gave them
wine and strong tea.

The priests discussed how to get Father Schiffer
and Father LaSalle out to the Novitiate. They were
afraid that blundering through the park with them

64 HIROSHIMA

would jar them too much on the wooden litters, and
that the wounded men would lose too much blood.
Father Kleinsorge thought of Mr. Tanimoto and his
boat, and called out to him on the river. When
Mr. Tanimoto reached the bank, he said he would be
glacf to take the injured priests and their bearers
upstream to where they could find a clear roadway.
The rescuers put Father Schiffer on to one of the
stretchers and lowered it into the boat, and two of
them went aboard with it. Mr. Tanimoto, who still
had no oars, poled the punt upstream.

About half an hour later, Mr. Tanimoto came back
and excitedly asked the remaining priests to help him
rescue two children he had seen standing up to their
shoulders in the river. A group went out and picked
them up two young girls who had lost their family
and were both badly burned. The priests stretched
them on the ground next to Father Kleinsorge and
then embarked Father LaSalle. Father Cieslik thought
he could make it out to the Novitiate on foot, so he
went aboard with the others. Father Kleinsorge
was too feeble-; he decided to wait in the park until
the next day. He asked the men to come back with
a handcart, so that they could take Mrs. Nakamura
and her sick children to the Novitiate.

Mr. Tanimoto shoved off again, As the boat load
of priests moved slowly upstream, they heard weak
cries for help. A woman's voice stood out especially :
" There are people here about to be drowned ! Help
us ! The water is rising 1 " The sounds came from
one of the sandspits, and those in the punt could see,
in the reflected light of the still-burning fires, a number

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 65

of wounded people lying at the edge of the river,
already partly covered by the flooding tide. Mr.
Tanimoto wanted to help them, but the priests were
afraid that Father SchifTer would die if they didn't
hurry, and they urged their ferryman along. He
dropped them where he had put Father Schiffer down
and then started back alone toward the sandspit.

The night was hot, and it seemed even hotter because
of the fires against the sky, but the younger of the two
girls Mr. Tanimoto and the priests had rescued com-
plained to Father Kleinsorge that she was cold. He
covered her with his jacket. She and her older sister
had been in the salt water of the river for a couple of
hours before being rescued. The younger one had
huge, raw flash burns on her body; the salt water
must have been excruciatingly painful to her. She
began to shiver heavily, and again said it was cold.
Father Kleinsorge borrowed a blanket from someone
nearby and wrapped her up, but she shook more and
more, and said again, " I am so cold," and then she
suddenly stopped shivering and was dead.

Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women
on the sandspit. He drove the boat on to the bank
and urged them to get aboard. They did not move
and he realised that they were too weak to lift them-
selves. He reached down and took a woman by the
hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like
pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to
sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the
water and, though a small man, lifted several of the
men and, women, who were naked, into his boat.
Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he re-

66 HIROSHIMA

membered uneasily what the great burns he had seen
during the day had been like : yellow at first, then red
and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally,
in the evening, suppurated and smelly. With the tide
risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had
to paddle most of the way across with it. On the other
side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies
out and carried them up the slope away from the
tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself,
" These are human beings." It took him three trips
to get them all across the river. When he had finished,
he decided he had to have a rest, and he went back to
the park.

As Mr. Tanimoto stepped up the dark bank, he
tripped over someone, and someone else said angrily,
"Look out! That's my hand." Mr. Tanimoto,
ashamed of hurting wounded people, embarrassed
at being able to walk upright, suddenly thought of
the naval hospital ship, which had not come (it never
did), and he had for a moment a feeling of blind,
murderous rage at the crew of the ship, and then at all
doctors. Why didn't they come to help these people ?

Dr. Fujii lay in dreadful pain throughout the night
on the floor of his family's roofless house on the edge
of the city. By the light of a lantern, he had examined
himself tod found : left clavicle fractured ; multiple
abrasions and lacerations of face and body, including
deep cuts on the chin, back, and legs; extensive
contusions on chest and trunk; a couple of ribs
possibly fractured. Had he not been so badly hurt,
he might have been at Asano Park, assisting the
wounded.

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 67

By nightfall, ten thousand victims of the explosion
had invaded the Red Cross Hospital, and Dr. Sasaki,
worn out, was moving aimlessly and dully up and down
the stinking corridors with wads of bandage and bottles*
of mercurochrome, still wearing the glasses he had
taken from the wounded nurse, binding up the worst
cuts as he came to them. Other doctors were putting
compresses of saline solution on the worst burns.
That was all they could do. After dark, they worked
by the light of the city's fires and by candles the ten
remaining nurses held for them. Dr. Sasaki had not
looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside
was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred
to him to ask any questions about what had happened
beyond the windows and doors. Ceilings and parti-
tions had fallen ; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were
everywhere. Patients were dying by the hundreds,
but there was nobody to carry away the corpses.
Some of the hospital staff distributed biscuits and rice
balls, but the charnel-house smell was so strong that
few were hungry. By three o'clock the next morning
after nineteen straight hours of his gruesome work,
Dr. Sasaki was incapable of dressing another wound.
He and some other survivors of the hospital staff got
straw mats and went outdoors thousands of patients
and hundreds of dead were in the yard and on the
drive way and hurried around behind the hospital
and lay down in hiding to snatch some sleep. But
within an hour wounded people had found them;
a complaining circle formed around them : " Doctors !
Help us ! How can you sleep ? " Dr. Sasaki got
up again and went back to work. Early in the day,

68 HIROSHIMA

he thought for the first time of his mother at then-
country home in Mukaihara, thirty miles from town.
He usually went home every night. He was afraid
she would think he was dead.

Near the spot up river to which Mr. Tanimoto had
transported the priests, there sat a large case of rice
cakes which a rescue party had evidently brought
for the wounded lying thereabouts but hadn't dis-
tributed. Before evacuating the wounded priests, the
others passed the cakes around and helped themselves.
A few minutes later, a band of soldiers came up, and
an officer, hearing the priests speaking a foreign
language, drew his sword and hysterically asked who
they were. One of the priests calmed him down and
explained that they were Germans allies. The officer
apologised and said that there were reports going
round that American parachutists had landed.

The priests decided that they should take Father
Schiffer first. As they prepared to leave, Father
Superior LaSalle said he felt awfully cold. One of the
Jesuits gave up his coat, another his shirt; they were
glad to wear less in the muggy night. The stretcher
bearers started out. The theological student led the
way and tried to warn the others of obstacles, but one
of the priests got a foot tangled in some telephone wire
and tripped and dropped his corner of the litter.
Father Schiffer rolled off, lost consciousness, came to,
and then vomited. The bearers picked him up and
went on with him to the edge of the city, where they
had arranged to meet a relay of other priests, left him
with them, and turned back and got the Father
Superior.

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 69

The wooden litter must have been terribly painful
for Father LaSalle, in whose back scores of tiny
particles of window glass were embedded. Near the
edge of town, the group had to walk around an auto-
mobile burned and squatting on the narrow road,
and the bearers on one side, unable to see their way in
the darkness, fell into a deep ditch. Father LaSalle
was thrown onto the ground and the litter broke in two.
One priest went ahead to get a handcart from the
Novitiate, but he soon found one beside an empty
house and wheeled it back. The priests lifted Father
LaSalle into the cart and pushed him over the bumpy
road the rest of the way. The rector of the Novitiate,
who had been a doctor before he entered the religious
order, cleaned the wounds of the two priests and put
them to bed between clean sheets, and they thanked
God for the care they had received.

Thousands of people had nobody to help them.
Miss Sasaki was one of them. Abandoned and
helpless, under the crude lean-to in the courtyard of
the tin factory, beside the woman who had lost a
breast and the man whose burned face was scarcely a
face any more, she suffered awfully that night from the
pain in her broken leg. She did not sleep at all;
neither did she converse with her sleepless companions.

In the park, Mrs. Murata kept Father Kieinsorge
awake all night by talking to him. None of the
Nakamura family were able to sleep, either; the
children, in spite of being very sick, were interested
in everything that happened. They were delighted
when one of the city's gas-storage tanks went up in a
tremendous burst of flame. Toshio, the boy, shouted

HIROSHIMA

to the others to look at the reflection in the river.
Mr. Tanimoto, after his long run and his many hours
of rescue work, dozed uneasily. When he awoke, in
the first light of dawn, he looked across the river
and saw that he had not carried the festered, limp
bodies high enough on the sandspit the night before.
The tide had risen above where he had put them;
they had not had the strength to move; they must
have drowned. He saw a number of bodies floating
in the river.

Early that day, August 7th, the Japanese radio
broadcast for the first time a succinct announcement
that very few, if any, of the people most concerned
with its content, the survivors in Hiroshima, happened
to hear: "Hiroshima suffered considerable damage
as the result of an attack by a few B-29s. It is believed
that a new type of bomb was used. The details are
being investigated." Nor is it probable that any oi
the survivors happened to be tuned in on a short-wave
rebroadcast of an extraordinary announcement by
the President of the United States, which identified
the new bomb as atomic : " That bomb had more
power than twenty thousand tons of T.N.T. It had
more than two thousand times the blast power of the
British Grand Slam, which is the largest bomb ever
yet used in the history of warfare." Those victims
who were able to worry at all about what had happened
thought of it and discussed it in more primitive,
childish terms gasoline sprinkled from an aeroplane,
maybe, or some combustible gas, or a big cluster of
incendiaries, or the work of parachutists ; but, even
if they had known the truth, most of them were too

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 71

busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they
were the objects of the first great experiment in the use
of atomic power, which (as the voices on the short
wave'shoOted) no country except the United States,
- with its industrial know-how, its willingness to throw
two billion gold dollars into an important wartime
gamble, could possibly have developed.

Mr. Tanimoto was still angry at doctors. He decided
that he would personally bring one lo Asano Park
by the scruff ot the neck, it necessary. He crossed the
river, went past the Shinto shrine where he had met his
wife for a brief moment the day before, and walked
to the East Parade Ground. Since this had long
before been designated as an evacuation area, he
thought he would find an aid station there. He did
find one, operated by an Army medical unit, but he
also saw that its doctors were hopelessly overburdened,
with thousands ot patients sprawled among corpses
across the field in iront of it. Nevertheless, he went
up to one of the army doctors and said, as reproach-
fully as he could, " Why have you not come to Asano
Park ? You are badly needed there."

Without even looking up from his work, the doctor
said in a tired voice, 4fc This is my station."

*' But there are many dying on the river bank ovei
there."

''* The first duty," the doctor said, " is to take care
of the slightly wounded."

* \vhy when there are many who are heavily
wounded on the river-bank ? "

The doctor moved to another patient. 'In an
emergency like this." he said, as if he were reciting

72 HIROSHIMA

from a manual, kt the first task ?s to help as many
as possible to save as many lives as possible. There
is no hope for the heavily wounded. They will die.
We can't bother with them."

" That might be right from a medical standpoint '
Mr. Tammoto began, but then he looked out across
the field, where the many dead lay close and intimate
with those who were still living, and he turned away
without finishing his sentence, angry now with himself.
He didn't know what to do ; he had promised some of
the dying people in the park that he would bring
medical aid. They might die feeling cheated. He
saw a ration stand at one side of the field, and he went
to it and begged some rice and biscuits, and he took
them back, in lieu of doctors, to the people in the
park.

The morning, again, was hot. Father Kleinsorge
went to fetch water for the wounded in a bottle and a
teapot he had borrowed. He had heard that it was
possible to get fresh tap water outside Asano Park.
Going through the rock gardens, he had to climb over
and crawl under the trunks of fallen pine trees; he
found he was weak. There were many dead in the
gardens. At a beautiful moon bridge, he passed a
naked living woman who seemed to have been burned
from head to toe and was red all over. Near the
entrance to the park, an Army doctor was working,
but the only medicine he had was iodine, which he
painted over cuts, bruises, slimy burns, everything
and by now everything that he had painted had pus on
it. Outside the gate of the park, Father Kleinsorge
found a faucet that still worked part of the plumbing

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 73

of a vanished house and he filled his vessels and
returned. When he had given the wounded the
water, he made a second trip. This time, the woman
by the bridge was dead. On his way back with the
water, he got lost on a detour around a fallen tree, and
as he looked for his way through the woods, he heard
a voice ask from the underbrush, " Have you anything
to drink ? " He saw a uniform. Thinking there was
just one soldier, he approached with the water. When
he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were
about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the
same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly
burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from
their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They
must have had their faces upturned when the bomb
went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel.)
Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds,
which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit
the spout of the teapot. So Father Kleinsorge got a
large piece of grass and drew out the stem so as to make
a straw, and gave them all water to drink that way.
One of them said, " I can't see anything." Father
Kleinsorge answered as cheerfully as he could, " There's
a doctor at the entrance to the park. He's busy now,
but he'll come soon and fix your eyts, I hope."

Since that day, Father Kleinsorge has thought back
to how queasy he had once been at the sight of pain,
how someone else's cut finger used to make him turn
faint. Yet there in the park he was so benumbed that
immediately after leaving this horrible sight he stopped
on a path by one of the pools and discussed with a
lightly wounded man whether it would be safe to eat

74 HIROSHIMA

the fat, two-foot carp that floated dead on the surface
of the water. They decided, after some consideration,
that it would be unwise.

Father Kleinsorge filled the containers a third time
and went back to the river-bank. There, amid the dead
and dying, he saw a young woman with a needle and
thread mending her kimono, which had been slightly
torn. Father Kleinsorge joshed her. " My, but
you're a dandy ! " he said. She laughed.

He felt tired and lay down. He began to talk with
two engaging children whose acquaintance he had
made the afternoon before. He learned that their
name was Kataoka; the girl was thirteen, the boy
five. The girl had been just about to set out for a
barber shop when the bomb fell. As the family
started for Asano Park, their mother decided to turn
back for some food and extra clothing; they became
separated from her in the crowd of fleeing people,
and they had not seen her since. Occasionally they
stopped suddenly in their perfectly cheerful playing
and began to cry for their mother.

It was difficult for all the children in the park to
sustain the sense of tragedy. Toshio Nakamura got
quite excited when he saw his friend Seichi Sato riding
up the river in a Wbat with his family, and he ran to the
bank and waved and shouted, " Sato ! Sato ! "

The boy turned his head and shouted, " Who's
that?"

" Nakamura."

" Hello, Toshio ! "

"Are you all safe?"

" Yes. What about you ? "

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 75

"Yes, we're all right. My sisters are vomiting,
but I'm fine."

Father Kleinsorge began to be thirsty in the dreadful
heat, and he did not feel strong enough to go for water
again. A little before noon, he saw a Japanese woman
handing something out. Soon she came to him and
said in a kindly voice, " These are tea leaves. Chew
them, young man, and you won't feel thirsty." The
woman's gentleness made Father Kleinsorge suddenly
want to cry. For weeks, he had been feeling oppressed
by the hatred of foreigners that the Japanese seemed
increasingly to show, and he had been uneasy even
with his Japanese friends. This strartger's gesture
made him a little hysterical.

Around noon, the priests arrived from the Novitiate
with the handcart. They had been to the site of the
mission house in the city and had retrieved some
suitcases that had been stored in the air-raid shelter
and had also picked up the remains of melted holy
vessels in the ashes of the chapel. They now packed
Father Kleinsorge's papier-mache suitcase and the
things belonging to Mrs. Murata and the Nakamuras
into the cart, put the two Nakamura girls aboard,
and prepared to start out. Then one of the Jesuits
who had a practical turn of mind remembered that
they had been notified some time before that if they
suffered property damage at the hands of the enemy,
they could enter a claim for compensation with the
prefectural police. The holy men discussed this
matter there in the park, with the wounded as silent as
the dead around them, and decided that Father
Kleinsorge, as a former resident of the destroyed

76 HIROSHIMA

mission, was the one to enter the claim. So, as the
others went off with the handcart, Father Klcinsorge
said good-bye to the Kataoka children and trudged
to a police station. Fresh, clean-uniformed policemen
from another town were in charge, and a crowd of
dirty and disarrayed citizens crowded around them,
mostly asking after lost relatives. Father Kleinsorge
filled out a claim form and started walking through
the centre of town on his way to Nagatsuka. It was
then that he first realised the extent of the damage;
he passed block after block of ruins, and even after
all he had seen in the park, his breath was taken away.
By the time he reached the Novitiate, he was sick with
exhaustion. The last thing he did as he fell into bed
was request that someone go back for the motherless
Kataoka children.

Altogether, Miss Sasaki was left two days and
two nights under the piece of propped-up roofing
with her crushed leg and her two unpleasant comrades.
Her only diversion was when men came to the factory
air-raid shelters, which she could see from under
one corner of her shelter, and hauled corpses up out
of them with ropes. Her leg became discoloured,
swollen, and putrid. All that time, she went without
food and water. On the third day, August 8th,
some friends who supposed she was dead came to look
for her body and found her. They told her that her
mother, father, and baby brother, who at the time of
the explosion* were in the Tamura Pediatric Hospital,
where the baby was a patient, had all been given up
as certainly dead, since the hospital was totally
destroyed. Her friends then left her to think that

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 77

piece of news over. Later, some men picked her up
by the arms and legs and carried her quite a distance
to a truck. For about an hour, the truck moved over
a bumpy road, and Miss Sasaki, who had become
convinced that she was dulled to pain, discovered
that^she was not. The men lifted her out at a relief
station in the section of Inokuchi, where two Army
doctors looked at her. The moment one of them
touched her wound, she fainted. She came to in
to hear them discuss whether or not to cut off her
leg; one said there was gas gangrene in the lips of the
wound and predicted she would die unless they
amputated, and the other said that was too bad,
because they had no equipment with which to do
the job. She fainted again. When she recovered
consciousness, she was being carried somewhere on a
stretcher. She was put aboard a launch, which went
to the nearby island of Ninoshima, and she was
taken to a military hospital there. Another doctor
examined her and said that she did not have gas
gangrene, though she did have a fairly ugly compound
fracture. He said quite coldly that he was sorry,
but this was a hospital for operative
only, and because she had no
have to return to Hiroshima that
doctor took her temperature,
the thermometer made him

That day, August 8th,
city to look for" Mr. Fukai, th
the diocese, who had ridden
flaming city on Father Kleinso
hari run hack cra/ilv into it.

gan,

78 HIROSHIMA

hunting in the neighbourhood of Sakai Bridge, where
the Jesuits had last seen Mr. Fukai ; he 'went to the
East Parade Ground, the evacuation area to which
the secretary might have gone, and looked for him
among the wounded and dead there; he went to the
prefectural police and made inquiries. He could not
find any trace of the man. Back at the Novitiate
that evening, the theological student, who had been
rooming with Mr. Fukai at the mission house, told the
priests that the secretary had remarked to him, during
an air-raid alarm one day not long before the bombing,
" Japan is dying. If there is a real air raid here in
Hiroshima, I want to die with our country." The
priests concluded that Mr. Fukai had run back to
immolate himself in the flames. They never saw him
again.

At the Red Cross Hospital, Dr. Sasaki worked for
three straight days with only one hour's sleep. On
the second day, he began to sew up the worst cuts,
and right through the following night and all the next
day he stitched. Many of the wounds were festered.
Fortunately, someone had found intact a supply of
a Japanese sedative, and he gave it to many
Word went around among the staff
jtnkt there :tm$& Ibave been something peculiar about
the great bomb, because on the second day the vice-
chief pf^he, hosprttal went down in the basement to
the va^t where th^JC^pay plates were stored and found
the whoTe stock '^fcfyfced as they lay. That day, a
fresh doctor and t&n 'nurses came in from the city of
Yamaguchi wilfo^xtfa bandages and antiseptics, and
the third -dav ^another ohvsician and a dozen more

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 79

nurses arrived from Matsue yet , there were still
only ^eight doctors for ten thousand patients. In the
afternoon of the third day, exhausted from his foul
tailoring, Dr. Sasaki became obsessed with the idea
that his mother thought he was dead. He got per-
mission to go to Mukaihara. He walked out to the
first suburbs, beyond which the electric train service
was still functioning, and reached home late in the
evening. His mother said she had known he was all
right all along; a wounded nurse had stopped by to
tell her. He went to bed and slept for seventeen
hours.

Before dawn on August 8th, s6meone entered the
room at the Novitiate where Father Kleinsorge was
in bed, reached up to the hanging light bulb, and
switched it on. The sudden flood of light, pouring in
on Father Kleinsorge's half sleep, brought him leaping
out of bed, braced for a new concussion. When he
realised what had happened, he laughed confusedly
and went back to bed. He stayed there all day.

On August 9th, Father Kleinsorge was still tired.
The rector looked at his cuts and said they were not
even worth dressing, and if Father Kleinsorge kepi
them clean, they would heal in three or four days.
Father Kleinsorge felt uneasy; he could not yet
comprehend what he had been through ; as if he were
guilty of something awful, he felt he had to go back
to the scene of the violence he had experienced. He
got up out of bed and walked into the city. He
scratched for a while in the ruins of the mission house,
but he found nothing. He went to the sites of a couple
of schools and asked after people he knew. He

80 HIROSHIMA

looked for some of the city's Japanese Catholics, but
he found only fallen houses. He walked back to the
Novitiate, stupefied and without any new under-
standing.

At two minutes after eleven o'clock on the morning
of August 9th, the second atomic bomb was dropped,
on Nagasaki. It was several days before the survivors
of Hiroshima knew they had company, because the
Japanese radio and newspapers were being extremely
cautious on the subject of the strange weapon.

On August 9th, Mr. Tanimoto was still working
in the park. He went to the suburb of Ushida, where
his wife was staying with friends, and got a tent which
he had stored there before the bombing. He now
took it to the park and set it up as a shelter for some of
the wounded who could not move or be moved.
Whatever he did in the park, he felt he was being
watched by the twenty-year-old girl, Mrs. Kamai, his
former neighbour, whom he had seen on the day
the bomb exploded, with her dead baby daughter in
her arms. She kept the small corpse in her arms
for four days, even though it began smelling bad on
the second day. Once, Mr. Tanimoto sat with her
for a while, and she told him that the bomb had
buried her under their house with the baby strapped
to her back, and that when she had dug herself free,
she had discovered that the baby was choking, its
mouth full of dirt With her little finger, she had
carefully cleaned out the infant's mouth, and for a
time the child had breathed normally and seemed all
right; then suddenly it had died. Mrs. Kamai
also talked about what a fine man her husband was,

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 81

and again urged Mr. Tanimoto to search for him.
Since Mr. Tanimoto had been all through the city
the first day and had seen terribly burned soldiers
from Kamai's post, the Chugoku Regional Army
Headquarters, everywhere, he knew it would be
impossible to find Kamai, even if he were living, but
of course, he didn't tell her that. Every time she saw
Mr. Tanimoto, she asked whether he had found her
husband. Once, he tried to suggest that perhaps it
was time to cremate the baby, but Mrs. Kamai only
held it tighter. He began to keep away from her,
but whenever he looked at her, she was staring at him
and her eyes asked the same question. He tried to
escape her glance by keeping his back turned to her
as much as possible.

The Jesuits took about fifty refugees into the exqui-
site chapel of the Novitiate. The rector gave them
what medical care he could mostly just the cleaning
away of pus. Each of the Nakamuras was provided
with a blanket and mosquito net. Mrs. Nakamura
and her younger daughter had no appetite and ate
nothing; her son and other daughter ate, and lost,
each meal they were offered. On August 10th, a
friend, Mrs. Osaki, came to see them and told them
that her son Hideo had been burned alive in the
factory where he worked. This Hideo had been a kind
of hero to Toshio, who had often gone to the plant
to watch him run his machine. That night, Toshio
woke up screaming. He had dreamed that he had seen
Mrs. Osaki coming out of an opening in the ground
with her family, and then he saw Hideo at his machine,
a big one with a revolving belt, and he himself was

82 HIROSHIMA

standing beside Hideo, and for some reason this was
terrifying

On August 10th, Father Klemsorge, having heard
from someone that Dr. Fujii had been injured and that
he had eventually gone to the summer house of a friend
of his named Okuma, in the village of Fukawa, asked
Father Cieslik if he would go and see how Dr. Fujii
was. Father Cieslik went to Misasa station, outside
Hiroshima, rode for twenty minutes on ari electric
train, and then walked for an {lour and a half in a
terribly hot sun to Mr. Okuma's house, which was
beside the Ota River at the foot of a mountain. He
found Dr. Fujii sitting in a chair in a kimono, applying
compresses to his broken collar-bone. The Doctor
told Father Cieslik about having lost his glasses and
said that his eyes bothered him. He showed the priest
huge blue and green stripes where beams had bruised
him. He offered the Jesuit first a cigarette and then
whisky, though it was only eleven in the morning.
Father Cieslik thought it would please Dr. Fujii if
he took a little, so he said yes. A servant brought some
Suntory whisky, and the Jesuit, the Doctor, and the
host had a very pleasant chat. Mr. Okuma had lived
in Hawaii, and he told some things about Americans.
Dr. Fujii talked a bit about the disaster. He said
that Mr. Okuma and a nurse had gone into the ruins
of his hospital and brought back a small safe which
he had moved into his air-raid shelter. This contained
soAie surgical instruments, and Dr. Fujii gave Father
Cieslik a few pairs of scissors and tweezers for the
rector at the Novitiate.^ Father Cieslik was bursting
with some inside dope he had, but he waited until

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 83

the conversation turned naturally to the mystery of the
bomb. Then he said he knew what kind of a bomb
it was; he had the secret on the best authority
that of a Japanese newspaperman who had dropped
in at the Novitiate. The bomb was not a bomb at
all ; it was a kind of fine magnesium powder sprayed
over the whole city by a single plane, and it exploded
when it came into contact with the live wires of the
city power system. " That means," said Dr. Fujii,
perfectly satisfied, since after all the information came
from a newspaperman, " that it can only be dropped
on big cities and only in the daytime, when the tram
lines and so forth are in operation."

After five days of ministering to the wounded in the
park, Mr. Tanhnoto returned, on August llth, to his
parsonage and dug around in the ruins. He retrieved
some diaries and church records that had been kept in
books and were only charred around the edges, as well
as some cooking utensils and pottery. While he was
at work, a Miss Tanaka came and said that her father
had been asking for him. Mr. Tanimoto had reason
to hate her father, the retired shipping-company
official who, though he made a great show of his
charity, was notoriously selfish and cruel, and who,
just a few days before the bombing, had said openly
to several people that Mr. Tanimoto was a spy for
the Americans. Several times he had derided Christi-
anity and called it un-Japanese. At the moment of the
bombing, Mr. Tanaka had been walking in the street
.in front of the city's radio station. He received
serious flash burns, but he was able to walk home.
He took refuge in his Neighbourhood Association

84 HIROSHIMA

shelter and from there tried hard to get ntedical aid.
He expected all the doctors of Hiroshima to come to
him, because he was so rich and so famous for giving
his money away. When none of them came, he
angrily set out to look for them; leaning on his
daughter's arm, he walked from private hospital to
private hospital, but all were in ruins, and he went
back and lay down in the shelter again. Now he was
very weak and knew he was going to die. He was
willing to be comforted by any religion.

Mr. Tanimoto went to help him. He descended into
the tomblike shelter and, when his eyes were adjusted
to the darkness, saw Mr. Tanaka, his face and arms
puffed up and covered with pus and blood, and his
eyes swollen shut. The old man smelled very bad,
and he moaned constantly. He seemed to recognise
Mr. Tanimoto's voice. Standing at the shelter stair-
way to get light, Mr. Tanimoto read loudly from a
Japanese-language pocket Bible : " For a thousand
years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past,
and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest the children
of men away as with a flood ; they are as a sleep ;
in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.
In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up; in the
evening it is cut down, and withereth. For we are
consumed by Thine anger and by Thy wrath are we
troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee,
our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance. For
all our days are passed away in Thy wrath : we spend
our years as a tale that is told . . . ."

Mr. Tanaka died as Mr. Tanimoto read the psalm.

On August llth, word came to the Ninoshima

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 85

Military Hospital that a large number of casualties
from the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters were
to arrive on the island that day, and it was deemed
necessary to evacuate all civilian patients. Miss
Sasaki, still running an alarmingly high fever, was put
on a large ship. She lay out on deck, with a pillow
under her leg. There were awnings over the deck
but the vessel's course put her in the sunlight. She
felt as if she were under a magnifying glass in the sun.
Pus oozed out of her wound, and soon the whole pillow
was covered with it. She was taken ashore at Hatsu-
kaichi, a town several miles to the south-west of
Hiroshima, and put in the Goddess of Mercy Primary
School, which had been turned into a hospital. She
lay there several days before a specialist on fractures
came from Kobe. By then her leg was red and swollen
up to her hip. The doctor decided he could not set
the breaks. He made an incision and put in a rubber
pipe to drain off the putrescence.

At the Novitiate, the motherless Kataoka children
were inconsolable. Father Cieslik worked hard to
keep them distracted. He put riddles to them. He
asked, " What is the cleverest animal in the world ? "
and after the thirteen-year-old girl had guessed the
ape, the elephant, the horse, he said, " No, it must
be the hippopotamus," because in Japanese that
animal is kaba, the reverse of baka, stupid. He ,told
Bible stories, beginning, in the order of things, with
the Creation. He showed them a scrapbook of
snapshots taken in Europe. Nevertheless, they cried
most of the time for their mother.

Several days later, Father Cieslik started hunting

86 HIROSHIMA

for the children's family. . First, he learned through
the police that an uncle had been to the authorities in
Kure, a city not far away, to inquire for the children,
After that, he heard that an older brother had been
trying to trace them through the post office in Ujina,
a ^suburb of Hiroshima. Still later, he heard Jhat the
mother was alive and was on Goto Island, off Nagasaki.
And at last, by keeping a check on the Ujina post
office, he got in touch with the brother and returned
the children to their mother.

About a week after the bomb dropped, a vague,
incomprehensible rumour reached Hiroshima that the
city had been destroyed by the energy released when
atoms were somehow split in two. The weapon
was referred to in this word-of-mouth report as genshi
bakudan the root characters of which can be trans-
lated as " original child bomb." No one understood
the idea or put any more credence in it than in the
powdered magnesium and such things. Newspapers
were being brought in from other cities, but they were
still confining themselves to extremely general state-
ments, such as Domei's assertion on August 12th:
" There is nothing to do but admit the tremendous
power of this inhuman bomb." Already, Japanese
physicists had entered the city with Lauritsen electro-
scopes and Neher electrometers; they understood the
idea all too well.

On August 12tV the Nakamuras, all of them still
rather sick, went to the nearby town of Kabe and
moved in with Mrs. Nakamura's sister-in-law. The
next day, Mrs. Nakamura, although she was too ill
to walk much, returned to Hiroshima jalone, by electric

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 87

car to the outskirts, by foot from there. All week,
at the Novitiate, she had worried about her mother,
brother, and older sister, who had lived in the part of
town called Fukuro, and besides, she felt drawn by
some fascination, just as Father Kleinsorge had been.
She discovered that her family were all dead. She
went back to Kabe so amazed and depressed by what
she had seen and learned in the city that she could not
speak that evening.

A comparative orderliness, at least, began to be
established at the Red Cross Hospital. Dr. Sasaki,
back from his rest, undertook to classify his patients
(who were still scattered everywhere, even on the stair-
ways). The staif gradually swept up the debris. Best
of all, the nurses and attendants started to remove
the corpses. Disposal of the dead, by decent cremation
and enshrinement, is a greater moral responsibility to
the Japanese than adequate care of the living. Relatives
identified most of the first day's dead in and around
the hospital. Beginning on the second day, whenever
a patient appeared to be moribund, a piece of paper
with his name on it was fastened to his clothing. The
corpse detail carried the bodies to a clearing outside,
placed them on pyres of wood from ruined houses,
burned them, put some of the ashes in envelopes
intended for exposed X-ray plates, marked the envelopes
with the names of the deceased, and piled them, neatly
and respectfully, in stacks in the main office. In a few
days, the envelopes filled one whole side of tjie im-
promptu shrine.

In Kabe, on the morning of August 1 5th, ten-year-old
Toshio Nakamura heard an airplane overhead. He

88 HIROSHIMA

ran outdoors and identified it with a professional eye
as a B-29. " There goes Mr. B !" he shouted.

One of his relatives called out to him, " Haven't
you had enough of Mr. B ?"

The question had a kind of symbolism. At almost
that very moment, the dull, dispirited voice of Hirohito,
the Emperor Tenno, was speaking for the first time
in history over the radio : " After pondering deeply
the general trends of the world and the actual con-
ditions obtaining in Our Empire to-day, We have
decided to effect a settlement of the present situation
by resorting to an extraordinary measure. . . ."

Mrs. Nakamura had gone to the city again, to dig
up some rice she had buried in her Neighbourhood
Association air-raid shelter. She got it and started
back for Kabe. On the electric car, quite by chance,
she ran into her younger sister, who had not been
in Hiroshima the day of the bombing. " Have you
heard the news ?" her sister asked.

" What news ?"

" The war is over."

" Don't say such a foolish thing, sister."

" But I heard it over the radio myself." And then,
in a whisper, " It was the Emperor's voice."

44 Oh," Mrs. Nakamura said (she needed nothing
more to make her give up thinking, in spite of the
atomic bomb, that Japan still had a chance to win
the war), " in that case . . ."

Some time later, in a letter to an American, Mr.
Tanimoto described the events of that morning. 4 * At
the time of the Post- War, the marvellous thing in our
history happened. Our Emperor broadcasted his own

DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 89

voice through radio directly to us, common people of
Japan. August 15th we were told that some news of
great importance could be heard and all of us should
hear it. So I went to Hiroshima railway station.
There set a loudspeaker in the ruins of the station.
Many civilians, all of them were in boundage, some
being helped by shoulder of their daughters, some
sustaining their injured feet by sticks, they listened to
the broadcast and when they came to realize the fact
that it was the Emperor, they cried with full tears in
their eyes. ' What a wonderful blessing it is that Tenno
himself call on us and we can hear his own voice in
person. We are thoroughly satisfied in such a great
sacrifice.' When they came to know the war was
ended that is, Japan was defeated, they, of course,
were deeply disappointed, but followed tffter their
Emperor's commandment in calm spirit, making whole-
hearted sacrifice for the everlasting peace of the world
and Japan started her new way."

IV

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW

ON August 18th, twelve days after the bomb burst,
Father Kleinsorge set out on foot for Hiroshima from
the Novitiate with his papier-mache suitcase in his
hand. He had begun to think that this bag, in which
he kept his valuables, had a talismanic quality, because
of the way he had found it after the explosion, standing
handle-side up in the doorway of his room, while the
desk under which he had previously hidden it was in
splinters all over the floor. Now he was using it to
carry the yen belonging to the Society of Jesus to the
Hiroshima branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank,
already re-opened in its half-ruined building. On
the whole, he felt quite well that morning. It is true
that the minor cuts he had received had not healed in
three or four days, as the rector of the Novitiate, who
had examined them, had positively promised they
would, but Father Kleinsorge had rested well for a
week and considered that he was again ready for hard
work. By now he was accustomed to the terrible scene
through which he walked on his way into the city:
the large rice field near the Novitiate, streaked with
brown ; the houses on the outskirts of the city, standing
but decrepit, with broken windows and dishevelled
tiles ; and then, quite suddenly, the beginning of the
four square miles of reddish-brown scar, where nearly
everything had been buffeted . down and burned ;
range on range of collapsed city blocks, with here and
there a crude sign erected on a pile of ashes and tiles
(" Sister, where are you ?" or " All safe and we live

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 91

at Toyosaka ") ; naked trees and canted telephone
poles; the few standing, gutted buildings only accen-
tuating the horizontality of everything else (the Museum
of Science and Industry, with its dome stripped to its
steel frame, as if for an autopsy ; the modern Chamber
of Commerce Building, its tower as cold, rigid, and
unassailable after the blow as before; the huge, low-
lying, camouflaged city hall ; the row of dowdy banks,
caricaturing a shaken economic system); and in the
streets a macabre traffic hundreds of crumpled
bicycles, shells of street cars and automobiles, all
halted in mid-motion. The whole way, Father Klein-
sorgs was oppressed by the thought that all the damage
he saw had been done in one instant by one bomb.
By the time he reached the centre of town, the day
had become very hot. He walked to the Yokohama
Bank, which was doing business in a temporary
wooden stall on the ground floor of its building,
deposited the money, went by the mission compound
just to have another look at the wreckage, and then
started back to the Novitiate. About half-way there,
he began to have peculiar sensations. The more or
less magical suitcase, now empty, suddenly seemed
terribly heavy. His knees grew weak. He felt excru-
ciatingly tired. With a considerable expenditure of
spirit, he managed to reach the Novitiate. He did
not think his weakness was worth mentioning to the
other Jesuits.. But a couple of days later, while attempt-
ing to say Mass, he had an onset of faintness and even
after three Attempts was unable to go through with
the service, and the next morning the rector, who
had examined Father Kleinsorge's apparently negli-

92 HIROSHIMA

gible but imhealed cuts daily, asked in surprise, " What
have you done to your wounds ?" They had suddenly
opened wider and were swollen and inflamed.

As she dressed on the morning of August 20th, in
the home of her sister-in-law in Kabe, not far from
Nagatsuka, Mrs. Nakamura, who had suffered no cuts
or burns at all, though she had been rather nauseated
all through the week she and her children had spent
as guests of Father Kleinsorge and the other Catholics
at the Novitiate, began fixing her hair and noticed,
after one stroke, that her comb carried with it a whole
handful of hair; the second time, the same thing
happened, so she stopped combing at once. But in
the next three or four days, her hair kept falling out
of its own accord, until she was quite bald. She began
living indoors, practically in hiding. On August 26th,
both she and her younger daughter, Myeko, woke up
feeling extremely weak and tired, and they stayed on
their bedrolls. Her son and other daughter, who had
shared every experience with her during and after the
bombing, felt fine.

At about the same time he lost track of the days,
so hard was he working to set up a temporary place
of worship in a private house he had rented in the
outskirts Mr. Tanimoto fell suddenly ill with a
general malaise, weariness, and feverishness, and he,
too, took to his bedroll on the floor of the half-wrecked
house of a friend in the suburb of Ushida.

These four did not realise it, but they were coming
down with the strange, capricious disease which came
later to be known as radiation sickness.

Miss Sasaki lay in steady pain in the Goddess of

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 93

Mercy Primary School, at Hatsukaichi, the fourth
station to the south-west of Hiroshima on the electric
train. An internal infection still prevented the proper
setting of the compound fracture of her lower left leg.
A young man who was in the same hospital and who
seemed to have grown fond of her in spite of her
unremitting preoccupation with her suffering, or else
just pitied her because of it, lent her a Japanese trans-
lation of de Maupassant, and she tried to read the
stories, but she could concentrate for only four or five
minutes at a time.

The hospitals and aid stations around Hiroshima
were so crowded in the first weeks after the bombing,
and their staffs were so variable, depending on their
health and on the unpredictable arrival of outside
help, that patients had to be constantly shifted from
place to place. Miss Sasaki, who had already been
moved three times, twice by ship, was taken at the end
of August to an engineering school, also at Hatsu-
kaichi. Because her leg did not improve but swelled
more and more, the doctors at the school bound it
with crude splints and took her by car, on September
9th, to the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima. This
was the first chance she had had to look at the ruins
of Hiroshima; the last time she had been carried
through the city's streets, she had been hovering on
the edge of unconsciousness. Even though the wreckage
had been described to her, and though she was still
in pain, the sight horrified and amazed her, and there
was something she noticed about it that particularly
gave her the creeps. Over everything up through
the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the river

94 HIROSHIMA

banks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing
on charred tree trunks was a blanket 6f fresh, vivid,
lush, optimistic green ; the verdancy rose even from the
foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid
the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the
city's bones. The bomb had not only left the under-
ground organs of plants intact ; it had stimulated them.
Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goose-
foot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited
bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic
grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the centre,
sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not
only standing among the charred remnants of the same
plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and
through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if
a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along
with the bomb.

At the Red Cross Hospital, Miss Sasaki was put
under the care of Dr. Sasaki. Now, a month after
the explosion, something like order had been re-
established in the hospital; which is to say that the
patients who still lay in the corridors at least had mats
to sleep on and that the supply of medicines, which
had given out in the first few days, had been replaced,
though inadequately, by contributions from other
cities. Dr. Sasaki, who had had one seventeen-hour
sleep at his home on the third night, had ever since
then rested only about six hours a night, on a mat at
the hospital ; he had lost twenty pounds from his very
small body ; he still wore the ill-fitting glasses he had
borrowed from an injured nurse.

Since Miss Sasaki was a woman and was so sick

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 95

(and perhaps, he afterwards admitted, just a little bit
because she was named Sasaki), Dr. Sasaki put her on
a mat in a semi-private room, which at that time had
only eight people in it. He questioned her and put
down on her record card, in the correct, scrunched-up
German in which he wrote all his records : " Mittel-
grosse Paticntin in gut cm Ernahntngszustand. Fraktur
am linken Unterschenkelknochen mil Wunde; Ansch-
wellung in der linken Unterschenkelgegend. Haut und
sichtbare Schleimhaute massig durchblutct und kein
Oedema" noting that she was a medium-sized female
patient in good general health; that she had a com-
pound fracture of the left tibia, with swelling of the
left lower leg; that her skin and visible mucous mem-
branes were heavily spotted with petechiae, which are
hemorrhages about the size of grains of rice, or even
as big as soya beans ; and, in addition, that her head,
eyes, throat, lungs, and heart were apparently normal ;
and that she had a fever. He wanted to set her fracture
and put her leg in a cast," but he had run out, of plaster
of Paris long since, so he just stretched her out on a
mat and prescribed aspirin for her fever, and glucose
intravenously and diastase orally for her under-
nourishment (which he had not entered on her record
because everyone suffered from it). She exhibited only
one of the queer symptoms so many of his patients
were just then beginning to show -the spot hemorr-
hages.

Dr. Fujii was still pursued by bad luck, which still
was connected with rivers. Now he was living in the
summer house of Mr. Okuma, in Fukawa. This house
clung to the steep banks of the Ota River. Here his

J6 HIROSHIMA

injuries seemed to make good progress, and he even
began to treat refugees who came to him from the
neighbourhood, using medical supplies he had retrieved
from a cache in the suburbs. He noticed in some of
his patients a curious syndrome of symptoms that
cropped out in the third and fourth weeks, but he was
not able to do much more than swathe cuts and burns.
Early in September, it began to rain, steadily and
heavily. The river rose. On September 17th, there
came a cloudburst and then a typhoon, and the water
crept higher and higher up the bank. Mr. Okuma and
Dr. Fujii became alarmed and scrambled up the
mountain to a peasant's house. (Down in Hiroshima,
the flood took up where the bomb had left off
swept away bridges that had survived the blast, washed
out streets, undermined foundations of buildings that
still stood and ten miles to the west, the Ono Army
Hospital, where a team of experts from Kyoto Imperial
University was, studying the delayed affliction of the
patients, suddenly slid down a beautiful, pine-dark
mountainside into the Inland Sea and drowned most
of the investigators and their mysteriously diseased
patients alike.) After the storm, Dr. Fujii and Mr.
Okuma went down to the river and found that the
Okuma house had been washed altogether away.

Because so many people were suddenly feeling sick
nearly a month after the atomic bomb was dropped,
an unpleasant rumour began to move around, and
eventually it made its way to the house in Kabe where
Mrs. Nakamura lay bald and ill. It was that the atomic
bomb had deposited some sort of poison on Hiroshima
which would give off deadly emanations for seven

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 97

years; nobody could go there all that time. This
especially upset Mrs. Nakamura, who remembered
that in a moment of confusion on the morning of the
explosion she had literally sunk her entire means of
livelihood, her Sankoku sewing machine, in the small
cement water tank in front of what was left of her
house; now no one would be able to go and fish it
out. Up to this time, Mrs. Nakamura and her relatives
had been quite resigned and passive about the moral
issue of the atomic bomb, but this rumour suddenly
aroused them to more hatred and resentment of
America than they had felt all through the war.

Japanese physicists, who knew a great deal about
atomic fission (one of them owned a cyclotron),
worried about lingering radiation at Hiroshima, and
in mid-August, not many days after President Truman's
disclosure of the typeof bomb that had been dropped,
they entered the city to make investigations. The first
thing they did was roughly to determine a centre by
observing the side on which telephone poles all round
the heart of the town wese scorched ; they settled on
the torii gateway of the Gokoku Shrine, right next to
the parade ground of the Chugoku Regional Army
Headquarters. From there, they worked north and
south with Lauritsen electroscopes, which are sensitive
to both beta rays and gamma rays. These indicated
that the highest intensity of radio-activity, near the
torii, was 4.2 times the average natural "leak" of
ultra-short waves for the earth of that area. The
scientists noticed that the flash of the bomb had;
discoloured concrete to a light reddish tint, had scaled 1
off the surface of granite, and had scorched certain

98 HIROSHIMA

other types of building material, and that consequently
the bomb had, in some places, left prints of the shadows
that had been cast by its light. The experts found, for
instance, a permanent shadow thrown on the roof of
the Chamber of Commerce Building (220 yards from
the rough centre) by the structure's rectangular tower ;
several others in the look-out post on top of the
Hypothec Bank (2,050 yards); another in the tower
of the Chugoku Electric Supply Building (800 yards) ;
another projected by the handle of a gas pump (2,630
yards); and several on granite tombstones in the
Gokoku Shrine (385 yards). By triangulating these
and other such shadows with the objects that formed
them, the scientists determined that the exact centre
was a spot a hundred and fifty yards south of the torii
and a few yards south-east of the pile of ruins that
had once been the Shima Hospital. (A few vague
human silhouettes were found, and these gave rise to
stories that eventually included fancy and precise
details. One story told how a painter on a ladder was
monumentalized in a kind *of bas-relief on the stone
facade of a bank building on which he was at work,
in the act of .dipping his brush into his paint can;
another, how a man and his cart on the bridge near
the Museum of Science and Industry, almost under
the centre of the explosion, were cast down in an
embossed shadow which made it clear that the man
was about to whip his horse.) Starting east and west
from the actual centre, the scientists, in early September,
made new measurements, and the highest radiation
they found this time was 3.9 times the natural " leak."
Since radiation of at least a thousand times the natural

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 99

" leak " would be required to cause serious effects on
the human body, the scientists announced that people
could enter Hiroshima without any peril at all.

As soon as this reassurance reached the household
in which Mrs. Nakamura was concealing herself or,
at any rate, within a short time after her hair had
started growing back again her whole family relaxed
their extreme hatred of America, and Mrs. Nakamura
sent her brother-in-law to look for the sewing machine.
It was still submerged in the water tank, and when he
brought it home, she saw, to her dismay, that it was
all rusted and useless.

By the end of the first week in September, Father
Kleinsorge was in bed at the Novitiate with a fever of
102.2, and since he seemed to be getting worse, his
colleagues decided to send him to the Catholic Inter-
national Hospital in Tokyo. Father Cieslik and the
rector took him as far as Kobe and a Jesuit from that
city took him the rest of the way, with a message
from a Kobe doctor to the Mother Superior of the
International Hospital : " Think twice before you give
this man blood transfusions, because with atomic-
bomb patients we aren't at all sure that, if you stick
needles in them, they'll stop bleeding."

When Father Kleinsorge arrived at the hospital, he
was terribly pale and very shaky. He complained that
the bomb had upset his digestion and given him
abdominal pains. His white blood count was three
thousand (five to seven thousand is normal), he was
seriously anaemic, and his temperature was 104. A
doctor who did not know much about these strange
manifestations Father Kleinsorge was one of a handful

100 HIROSHIMA

of atomic patients who had reached Tokyo came to
see him, and to the patient's face he was most encour-
aging. " You'll be out of here in two weeks," he said.
But when the doctor got out in the corridor, he said
to the Mother Superior, " He'll die. All these bomb
people die you'll see. They go along for a couple of
weeks and then they die."

The doctor prescribed suralimentation for Father
Kleinsorge. Every three hours, they forced some eggs
or beef juice into him, and they fed him all the sugar
he could stand. They gave him vitamins, and iron pills
and arsenic (in Fowler's solution) for his anaemia.
He confounded both the doctor's predictions; he
neither died nor got up in a fortnight. Despite the
fact that the message from the Kobe doctor deprived
him of transfusions, which would have been the most
useful therapy of all, his fever and his digestive troubles
cleared up fairly quickly. His white count went up for
a while, but early in October it dropped again, to
3,600; then, in ten days, it suddenly climbed above
normal, to 8,800; and it finally settled at 5,800. His
ridiculous scratches puzzled everyone. For a few days,
they would ipend, and then, when he moved around,
they would open up again. As soon as he began to
feel well, he enjoyed himself tremendously. In Hiro-
shima he had been one of thousands of sufferers ; in
Tokyo he was a curiosity. Young American Army
doctors came by the dozen to observe him. Japanese
experts questioned him. A newspaper interviewed
him. And once, the confused doctor came and shook
his head and said, " Baffling cases, these atomic-bomb
people."

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 101

Mrs. Nakamura lay indoors with Myeko. They
both continued sick, and though Mrs. Nakamura
vaguely sensed that their* trouble was caused by the
bomb, she was too poor to see a doctor and so never
knew exactly what the matter was. Without any
treatment at all, but merely resting, they began gradually
to feel better. Some of Myeko's hair fell out, and she
had a tiny burn on her arm which took months to
heal. The boy, Toshio, and the older girl, Yaeko,
seemed well enough, though they, too, lost some hair
and occasionally had bad headaches. Toshio was still
having nightmares, always about the nineteen-year-old
mechanic, Hideo Osaki, his hero, who had been killed
by the bomb.

On his back with a fever of 104, Mr. Tanimoto
worried about all the funerals he ought to be conducting
for the deceased of his church. He thought he was just
overtired from the hard work he had done since the
bombing, but after the fever had persisted for a few
days, he sent for a doctor. The doctor was too busy
to visit him in Ushida, but he dispatched a nurse, who
recognized his symptoms as those of mild radiation
disease and came back from time to time to give him
injections of Vitamin B . A Buddhist priest with
whom Mr. Tanimoto was acquainted called on him
and suggested that moxibustion might give him
relief; the priest showed the pastor how to give himself
the ancient Japanese treatment, by setting fire to a
twist of the stimulant herb moxa placed on the wrist
pulse. Mr. Tanimoto found that each moxa treatment
temporarily reduced his fever one degree. The nurse
had told him to eat as much as possible, and every

102 HIROSHIMA t

few days his mother-in-law brought him vegetables
and fish from Tsuzu, twenty miles away, where she
lived. He spent a month in bed, and then went ten
hours by train to his father's home in Shikoku. There
he rested another month.

Dr. Sasaki and his colleagues at the Red Cross
Hospital watched the unprecedented disease unfold
and at last evolved a theory about its nature. It had,
they decided, three stages. The first stage had been
all over before the doctors even knew they were dealing
with a new sickness; it was the direct reaction to the
bombardment of the body, at the moment when
the bomb went off, by neutrons, beta particles, and
gamma rays. The apparently uninjured people who
had died so mysteriously in the first few hours or days
had succumbed in this first stage. It killed ninety-five
per cent, of the people within a half mile of the centre,
and many thousands who were farther away. The
doctors realized in retrospect that even though most
of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast
effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill
them. The rays simply destroyed body cells caused
their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls. Many
people who did not die right away came down with
nausea, headache, diarrhoea, malaise, and fever, which
lasted several days. Doctors could not be Certain
whether some of these symptoms were the result of
radiation or nervous shock. The second stage set in
ten or fifteen days after the bombing. The main
symptom was falling hair* Diarrhoea and fever, which
in some cases went as high as 106, came next. Twenty-
five to thirty days after the explosion, blood disorders

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 103

appeared: gums bled, tlie white-blood-cell count
dropped sharply, and petechiae appeared on the skin
and mucous membranes. The drop in the number o(
white blood corpuscles reduced the patient's capacity
to resist infection, so open wounds were unusually
slow in healing and many of the sick developed sore
throats and mouths. The two key symptoms, on which
the doctors came to base their prognosis, were fever
and the lowered white-corpuscle count. If fever
remained steady and high, the patient's chances for
survival were poor. The white count almost always
dropped below four thousand; a patient whose count
fell below one thousand had little hope of living.
Toward the end of the second stage, if the patient
survived, anaemia, or a drop in the red blood count,
also set in. The third stage was the reaction that came
when the body struggled to compensate for its ills
when, for instance, the white count not only returned
to normal but increased to much higher than normal
levels. In this stage, many patients died of complica-
tions, such as infections in the chest cavity. Most
burns healed with deep layers of pink, rubbery scar
tissue, known as keloid tumours. The duration of the
disease varied, depending on the patient's constitution
and the amount of radiation he had received. Some
victims recovered in a week; with others the disease
dragged on for months.

As the symptoms revealed themselves, it became
clear that many of them resembled the effects of over-
doses of X-ray, and the doctors based their therapy
on that likeness. They gave victims liver extract,
blood transfusions, and vitamins, especially B r The

104 HIROSHIMA

shortage of supplies and instruments hampered them.
Allied doctors who came in after the surrender found
plasma and penicillin very effective. Since the blood
disorders were, in the long run, the predominant
factor in the disease, some of the Japanese doctors
evolved a theory as to the seat of the delayed sickness.
They thought that perhaps gamma rays, entering the
body at the time of the explosion, made the phos-
phorus in the victims' bones radio-active, and that
they in turn emitted beta particles, which, though they
could not penetrate far through flesh, could enter the
bone marrow, where blood is manufactured, and
gradually tear it down. Whatever its source, the
disease had some baffling quirks. Not all the patients
exhibited all the main symptoms. People who suffered
flash burns were protected, to a considerable extent,
from radiation sickness. Those who had lain quietly
for days or even hours after the bombing were much
less liable to get sick than those who had been active.
Grey hair seldom fell out. And, as if nature were
protecting man against his own ingenuity, the repro-
ductive processes were affected for a time ; men became
sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped.
For ten days after the flood, Dr. Fujii lived in the
peasant's house on the mountain above the Ota.
Then he heard about a vacant private clinic in Kaitaichi,
a suburb to the east of Hiroshima, He bought it at
once, moved there, and hung out a sign inscribed in
English, in honour of the conquerors :

M. FUJII, M.D.

MEDICAL AND VENEREAL

Quite recovered from his wounds, he soon built up

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 105

a strong practice, and he was delighted, in the evenings,
to receive members of the occupying forces, on whom
he lavished whisky and practised English.

Giving Miss Sasaki a local anaesthetic of procaine,
Dr. Sasaki made an incision in her leg on October
23rd, to drain the infection, which still lingered on
eleven weeks after the injury. In the following days,
so much pus formed that he had to dress the opening
each morning and evening. A week later, she com-
plained of great pain, so he made another incision; he
cut still a third, on November 9th, and enlarged it on
the twenty-sixth. All this time, Miss Sasaki grew,
weaker and weaker, and her spirits fell low. One day,
the young man who had lent her his translation of
de Maupassant at Hatsukaichi came to visit her; he
told her that he was going to Kyushu but that when
he came back, he would like to see her again. She
didn't care. Her leg had been so swollen and painful
all along that the doctor had not even tried to set the
fractures, and though an X-ray taken in November
showed that the bones were mending, she could see
under the sheet that her left leg was nearly three inches
shorter than her right and that her left foot was
turning inward. She thought often of the man to
whom she had been engaged. Someone told her he
was back from overseas. She wondered what he had
heard about her injuries that made him stay away.

Father Kleinsorge was discharged from the hospital
in Tokyo on December 19th and took a train home.
On the way, two days later, at Yokogawa, a stop just
before Hiroshima, Dr. Fujii boarded the train. It was
the first time the two men had met since before the

106 HIROSHIMA

bombing. They sat together. Dr. Fuji! said he was
going to the annual gathering of his family, on the
anniversary of his father's death. When they started
talking about their experiences, the Doctor was quite
entertaining as he told how his places of residence
kept falling into rivers. Then he asked Father Klein-
sorge how he was, and the Jesuit talked about his stay
in the hospital. " The doctors told me to be cautious,"
he said. " They ordered me to have a two-hour nap
every afternoon."

Dr. Fujii said, *' It's hard to be cautious in Hiro-
shima these days. Everyone seems to be so busy."

A new municipal government, set up under Allied
Military Government direction, had gone to work at
last in the city hall. Citizens who had recovered from
various degrees of radiation sickness were coming
back by the thousand by November 1st, the popula-
tion, mostly crowded into the outskirts, was already
1217,000, more than a third of the war-time peak
and the government set in motion all kinds of projects
to put them to work rebuilding the city. It hired men
to clear the streets, and others to gather scrap iron,
which they sorted and piled in mountains opposite
the city hall. Some returning residents were putting
up their own shanties and huts, and planting small
squares of winter wheat beside them, but the city also
authorised and built four hundred one-family
** barracks." Utilities were repaired electric lights
shone again, trams started running, and employees of
the waterworks fixed seventy thousand leaks in mains
and plumbing. A Planning Conference, with an
enthusiastic young Military Government officer^.

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 107

Lieutenant John D. Montgomery, of Kalamazoo, as
its adviser, began to consider what sort of city the
new Hiroshima shoutd be. The ruined city had
flourished and had been an inviting target mainly
because it had been one of the most important military-
command and communications 'centres in Japan, and
would have become the Imperial headquarters had
the islands been invaded and Tokyo been captured.
Now there would be no huge military establishments
to help revive the city. The Planning Conference, at
a loss as to just what importance Hiroshima could
have, fell back on rather vague cultural and paving
projects. It drew maps with avenues a hundred yards
wide and thought seriously of preserving the half-
ruined Museum of Science and Industry more or less
as it was, as a monument to the disaster, and naming
it the Institute of International Amity. Statistical
workers gathered what figures they could on the effects
of the bomb. They reported that 78,150 people had
been killed, 13,983 were missing, and 37,425 had been
injured. No one in the city government pretended
that these figures were accurate though the Americans
accepted them as official and as the months went by
and more and more hundreds of corpses were dug up
from the ruins, and as the number of unclaimed urns
of ashes at the Zempoji Temple in Koi rose into the
thousands, the statisticians began to say that at least
a hundred thousand people had lost their lives in the
bombing. Since many people died of a combination
of causes, it was impossible to figure exactly how
many were killed by each cause, but the statisticians
calculated that about twenty-five per cent, had died ot

108 HIROSHIMA

direct burns from the bomb, about fifty per cent, from
other injuries, and about twenty per cent, as a result
of radiation effects. The statisticians' figures on
property damage were more reliable: sixty-two thou-

1 sand out of ninety thousand buildings destroyed,
and six thousand more damaged beyond repair. In the
heart of the city, they found only five modern
buildings that could be used again without major
repairs. This small number was by no means the fault
of flimsy Japanese construction. In fact, since the
1923 earthquake, Japanese building regulations had
required that the roof of each large building be
able to bear a minimum load of seventy pounds per

. square foot, whereas American regulations do not
normally specify more than forty pounds per square

; foot.

Scientists swarmed into the city. Some of them
measured the force that had been necessary to shift
marble gravestones in the cemeteries, to knock over
twenty-two of the forty-seven railroad cars in the
yards at Hiroshima station, to lift and move the
concrete roadway on one of the bridges, and to perform
other noteworthy acts of strength, and concluded that
the pressure exerted by the explosion varied from 5.3
to 8.0 tons per square yard. Others found that mica,
of which the melting point is 900 C., had fused on
granite gravestones three hundred and eighty yards
from the centre ; that telephone poles of Cryptomeria
iaponica, whose carbonisation temperature is 240 C.,
had been charred at forty-four hundred yards from
the centre ; and that the surface of grey clay tiles of
the type used in Hiroshima, whose melting point is

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 109

1,300C, had dissolved at six hundred yards; and
after examining other significant ashes and melted
bits, they concluded* that the bomb's heat on the
ground at the centre must have been 6,000 C. And
from further measurements of radiation, which
involved, among other things, the scraping up of
fission fragments from roof troughs and drainpipes as
far away as the suburb of Takasu, thirty-three hundred
yards from the centre, they learned some far more
important facts about the nature of the bomb. Genera-
MacArthur's headquarters systematically censored all
mention of the bomb in Japanese scientific publical
tions, but soon the fruit of the scientists' calculations
became common knowledge among Japanese physicists,
doctors, chemists, journalists, professors, and, no doubt,
those statesmen and military men who were still in
circulation. Long before the American public had
been told, most of the scientists and lots of non-scientists
in Japan knew from the calculations of Japanese
nuclear physicists that a uranium bomb had exploded
at Hiroshima and a more powerful one, of plutonium,
at Nagasaki. They also knew that theoretically one
ten times as powerful or twenty could be developed.
The Japanese scientists thought they knew the exact
height at which the bomb at Hiroshima was exploded
and the approximate weight of the uranium used.
They estimated that, even with the primitive bomb used
at Hiroshima, it would require a shelter of concrete
fifty inches thick to protect a human being entirely
from radiation sickness. The scientists had these and
other details which remained subject to security ip the
United States printed and mimeographed and bound

110 HIROSHIMA

into little books. The Americans knew of the existence
of these, but tracing them and seeing that they did
not fall into the wrong hands would have obliged the
occupying authorities to set up, for this one purpose
alone, an enormous police system in Japan. Altogether,
the Japanese scientists were somewhat amused at the
efforts of their conquerors to keep security on atomic
fission.

Late in February, 1946, a friend of Miss Sasaki's
called on Father Kleinsorge and asked him to visit
her in the hospital. She had been growing more and
more depressed and morbid ; she seemed little interested
in living. Father Kleinsorge went to see her several
times. On his first visit, he kept the conversation
general, formal, and yet vaguely sympathetic, and did
not mention religion. Miss Sasaki herself brought
it up the second time he dropped in on her. Evidently
she had had some talks with a Catholic. She asked
bluntly, '* If your God is so good and kind, how can
he let people 'suffer like this ?" She made a gesture
which took in her shrunken leg, the other patients in
her room, and Hiroshima as a whole.

" My child," Father Kleinsorge said, " man is not
now in the condition God intended. He has fallen
from grace through sin." And he went on to explain
all the reasons for everything.

It came to Mrs. Nakamura's attention that a
carpenter from Kabe was building a number of wooden
shanties in Hiroshima which he rented for fifty yen a
month $3.33, at the fixed rate of exchange. Mrs.
Nakamura had lost the certificates for her bonds and
other wartime savings, but fortunately she had copied

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 111

off all the numbers just a few days before the bombing
and had taken the list to Kabe, and so, when her hair
had grown in enough for her to be presentable, she
went to her bank in Hiroshima, and a clerk there
told her that after checking her numbers against the
records the bank would give her her money. As soon as
she got it, she rented one of the carpenter's shacks.
It was in Nobori-cho, near the site of her former house,
and though its floor was dirt and it was dark inside,
it was at least a home in Hiroshima, and she was no
longer dependent on the charity of her in-laws. During
the spring, she cleared away some nearby wreckage
and planted a vegetable garden. She cooked with
utensils and ate off plates she scavenged from the
debris. She sent Myeko to the kindergarten which the
Jesuits reopened, and the two older children attended
Nobori-cho Primary School, which, for want of
buildings, held classes out of* doors. Toshio wanted
to study to be a mechanic, like his hero, Hideo Osaki.
Prices were high; by midsummer Mrs. Nakamura's
savings were gone. She sold some of her clothes
to get food. She had once had several expensive
kimonos, but during the war one had been stolen,
she had given one to a sister who had been bombed
out in Tokuyama, she had lost a couple in the Hiro-
shima bombing, and now she sold her last one. It
brought only a^ hundred yen, which did not last long.
In June, she went to Father Kleinsorge for advice
about how to get along, and in early August, she was
still considering the two alternatives he suggested
taking work as a Domestic for some of the Allied
occupation forces, or borrowing from her relatives

112 HIROSHIMA

enough money, about five hundred yen, or a bit more
than thirty dollars, to repair her rusty sewing machine
and resume the work of a seamstress.

When Mr. Tanimoto returned from Shikoku, he
draped a tent he owned over the roof of the badly
damaged house he had rented in Ushida. The roof
still leaked, but he conducted services in the damp
living-room. He began thinking about raising money
to restore his church in the city. He became quite
friendly with Father Kleinsorge and saw the Jesuits
often. *He envied them their Church's wealth; they
seemed to be able to do anything they wanted. He
had nothing to work with except his own energy,
and that was not what it had been.

The Society of Jesus had been the first institution
to build a relatively permanent shanty in the ruins
of Hiroshima. That had been while Father Kleinsorge
was in the hospital. A* soon as he got back, he began
living in the shack, and he and another priest, Father
Laderman, who had joined him in the mission, arranged
for the purchase of three of the standardised
" barracks," which the city was selling at seven
thousand yen apiece. They put two together, end
to end, and made a pretty chapel of them ; they ate
in the third. When materials were available, they
commissioned a contractor to build a three-storey
mission house exactly like the one that had been
destroyed in the fire. In the compound, carpenters
cut timbers, gouged mortises, shaped tenons, whittled
scores of wooden pegs and bored holes for them,
until ail the parts for the house^vere in a neat pile;
then, in three days, they put the whole thing together;

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 113

like an Oriental puzzle, without any nails at all. Father
Kleinsorge was finding it hard, as Dr. Fujii had
suggested he would,, to be cautious and to take his
naps. He went out every day on foot to call on
Japanese Catholics and prospective converts. As the
months went by, he grew more and more tired. In
June, he read an article in the Hiroshima Chugoku
warning survivors against working too hard but
what could he do ? By July, he was worn out, and
early in August, almost exactly on the anniversary of
the bombing, he went back to the Catholic Inter-
national Hospital, in Tokyo, for a month's rest.

Whether or not Father Kleinsorge's answers to Miss
Sasaki's questions about life were final and absolute
truths, she seemed quickly to draw physical strength
from them. Dr. Sasaki noticed it and congratulated
Father Kleinsorge. By April 15th, her temperature
and white count were normal and the infection in the
wound was beginning to clear up. On the twentieth,
there was almost no pus, and for the first time she
jerked along a corridor on crutches. Five days later,
the wound had begun to heal, and on the last day of
the month she was discharged.

During the early summer, she prepared herself for
conversion to Catholicism. In that period she had
ups and downs. Her depressions were deep. She
knew she would always be a cripple. Her fiance
never came to see her. There was nothing for her
to do*except read and look out, from her house on a
hillside in Koi, across the ruins of the city where her
parents and brother died. She was nervous, and any
sudden noise made her put her hands quickly to her

114 HIROSHIMA

throat. Her leg still hurt; she rubbed it often and
patted it, as if to console it.

It took six months for the Red Cross Hospital, and
even longer for Dr. Sasaki to get back to normal.
Until the city restored electric power, the hospital
had to limp along with the aid of a Japanese Army
generator in its back yard. Operating tables, X-ray
machines, dentist chairs, everything complicated and
essential came in a trickle of charity from other cities.
In Japan, face is important even to institutions, and
long before the Red Cross Hospital was back to par
on basic medical equipment, its directors put up a new
yellow brick veneer fagade, so the hospital became
the handsomest building in Hiroshima from the
street. For the first four months, Dr. Sasaki was the
only surgeon on the staff and he almost never left the
building ; then, gradually, he began to take an interest
in his own life again. He got married in March. He
gained back some of the weight he lost, but his appetite
remained only Fair; before the bombing, he used to
eat four rice balls at every meal, but a year after it
he could manage only two. He felt tired all the time.
"But I have to realise," he said, "that the whole
community is tired."

A year after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki
was a cripple ; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute ; Father
Kleinsorge was back in the hospital ; Dr. Sasaki was
not capable of the work he once could do ; Dr, Fujii
had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many
years to acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding
it ; Mr. Tanimoto's church had been ruined and he no
longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 115

six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima,
would never be the same. What they thought of their
experiences and tile use of the atomic bomb was, of
course, not unanimous. One feeling they did seem
to share, however, was a curious kind of elated com-
munity spirit, something like that of the Londoners
after their blitz a pride in the way they and their
fellow-survivors had stood up to a dreadful ordeal.
Just before the anniversary, Mr. Tanimoto wrote in a
letter to an American some words which expressed
this feeling: "What a heartbreaking scene this was
the first night ! About midnight I landed on the river-
bank. So many injured people lay on the ground
that I made my way by striding over them. Repeating
" Excuse me," I forwarded and carried a tub of water
with me and gave a cup of water to each one of them.
They raised their upper bodies slowly and accepted
a cup of water with a bow and drunk quietly and,
spilling any remnant, gave back a cup with hearty
expression of their thankfulness, and said, ' 1 couldn't
help my sister, wno was buried under the house,
because I had to take care of my mother who got a
deep wound on her eye and our house soon set fire
and we hardly escaped. Look, I lost my home, my
family, and at last myself bitterly injured. But now
I have got my mind to dedicate what I have and to
complete the war for our country's sake.' Thus
they pledged to me, even women and children did the
same. Being entirely tired I lied down on the ground
among them, but couldn't sleep at all. Next morning
I found many men and women dead, whom I gave
water last night But, to my great surprise, I never

116 HIROSHIMA

heard any one cry in disorder, even though they
suffered in great agony. They died in silence, with no
grudge, setting their teeth to bear it. All for the
country !

" Dr. Y. Hiraiwa, professor of Hiroshima University
of Literature and Science, and one of my church
members, was buried by the bomb under the two-
storied house with his son, a student of Tokyo Uni-
versity. Both of them could not move an inch under
tremendously heavy pressure. And the house already
caught fire. His son said, ' Father, we can do nothing*
except nake our mind up to consecrate our lives for
the country. Let us give Banzai to our Emperor.'
Then the father followed after his son, ' Tenno-heika,
Banzai, Banzai, Banzai ! ' In the result, Dr. Hiraiwa
said, * Strange to say, I felt calm and bright and peace-
ful spirit in my heart, when I chanted Banzai to T6nno.'
Afterwards his son got out and digged down and pulled
out his father and thus they were saved. In thinking
of their experience of that time Dr. Hiraiwa repeated,
4 What a fortunate that we are Japanese ! It was my
first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when 1
decided to die for our Emperor.'

" Miss Kayoko Nobutojd, a student of girl's high
school, Hiroshima Jazabuin, and a daughter of my
church member, was taking rest with her friends beside
the heavy fence of the Buddhist Temple. At the
moment the atomic bomb was dropped, the fence
fell upon them. They could not move a bit under
such a heavy fence and then smoke entered into even
a crack and choked their breath. One of the girls
begun to sing Kimi ga yo, national anthem, and others

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 117

followed in chorus and died. Meanwhile one of them
found a crack and struggled hard to get out. When
she was taken in the Red Cross Hospital she told how
her friends died, tracing back in her memory to singing
in chorus our national anthem. They were just
thirteen years old.

" Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the
atomic bombing, believing that it was for Emperor's
sake."

A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima
remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of
using the bomb. Possibly they were too terrified by it
to want to think about it at all. Not many of them
even bothered to find out much about what it was like.
Mrs. Nakamura's conception of it and awe of it-
was typical. " The atom bomb," she would say
when asked about it, " is the size of a matchbox. The
heat of it was six thousand times that of the sun. It
exploded in the air. There is some radium in it. I
don't know just how it works, but when the radium is
put together, it explodes." As for the use of the
bomb, she would say, " It was war and we had to
expect it." And then she would add, " Shikata ga
nai" a Japanese expression as common as, and corres-
ponding to, the Russian word " nichevo " : " It can't
be helped. Oh, well. Too bad." Dr. Fujii said
approximately the same thing about the use of the
bomb to Father Kleinsorge one evening, in German :
44 Da ist nichts zu machen. There's nothing to be
done about it."

Many citizens of Hiroshima, however, continued
to feel a hatred for Americans which nothing could

118 HIROSHIMA

possibly erase. " I see," Dr. Sasaki once said, ** that
they are holding a trial for war criminals in Tokyo
just now. I think they ought to try the men who
decided to use the bomb and they should hang them
all."

Father Kleinsorge and the other German Jesuit
priests, who, as foreigners, could be expected to take a
relatively detached view, often discussed the ethics of
using the bomb. One of them, Father Siemes, who
was out at Nagatsuka at the time of the attack, wrote
in a report to the Holy See in Rome, " Some of us
consider the bomb in the same category as poison
gas and were against its use on a civilian population.
Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried
on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians
and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective
force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to
surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It
seems logical that he who supports total war in principle
cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux
of the matter is whether total war in its present form
is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does
it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences
which far exceed whatever good might result ? When
will our moralists give us a clear answer to this
question ? "

It would be impossible to say what horrors were
embedded in the minds of the children who lived
through the day of ihe bombing in Hiroshima. On
the surface their recollections, months after the disaster,
were of an exhilarating adventure. Toshio Nakamura,
who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon

PANIC GRASS AND FEVERFEW 119

able to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience,
and a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the
following matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at
Nobori-cho Primary School: "The day before the
bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was
eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to
little sister's sleeping place. When we were saved
I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I
started to pack our things. The neighbours were
walking around burned and bleeding. Hataya-,swz
told me to run away with her. I said 1 wanted to
wait for my mother. We went to the park. A
whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I
saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park
one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met
my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were
looking for their mothers. But Kikuki's mother was
wounded and Murakami's mother, alas, was dead."

RECENT AND FORTHCOMING
PENG UINS

THE ANATOMY OF PEACE

BY EMERY REVES

IN a book destined to startle by the very nature of its simply-
stated truths, Emery Reves analyzes the cause of war and the
nature of peace. He finds that the only condition in human
society that creates war is the unregulated relationship between
sovereign social groups : that wars occur wherever and when-
ever sovereign power units come into contact.

Peace will exist, he declares, only when absolute national
sovereignty, which causes anarchy in international relations,
gives way to universal legal order when the relationship
between nations is regulated not by treaties but by law.

Since its first publication in June, 1945, over 150,000 copies
of this book have been sold in America. It has been argued
about by over 20,000 discussion groups in the United States.
An open letter to the American people, urging them to read
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Penguin Books have arranged for the publication of the book
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A PENGUIN BOOK
(599)

THE NUREMBERG TRIALS

BY R. W. COOPER

With a foreword by
Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, P.C., M.P.

THIS popular but full account of the epoch-making trial ot
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Books by The Times special correspondent, is intended as a
permanent summary and record of the first attempt to bring
to justice the authors and begetters of an international crime
against humanity.

The reasons for the holding of the trial are discussed in
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Although not an " official " publication, tlje book has been
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and its treatment of the material is dispassionate and objective

A PENGUIN BOOK
(598)

WHY SMASH ATOMS?

A. K. SOLOMON

WHAT we to-day calJ atom-smashing, the scientists ot the
Middle Ages called transmutation, a change in the kernel of
the atom so violent that its elementary nature is altered. In
the Middle Ages the problem was the conversion of metals
into gold, the creation ,of riches from poverty

Unfortunately the forces required are so great that the
alchemists could not possibly have been successful. It was
not until 1919 that a scientist, Lord Rutherford, at Cambridge
University, for the first time actually broke through the im-
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making one element from another, in altering the basic nature
of one atom so completely that it became a different atom.

Rutherford's discovery opened the wa> to a significant
increase in our knowledge of the fundamental constitution of
matter All over the world scientists are to-day engaged in
atom-smashing. The results are not only transforming the
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practical effect in the field of medicine, but have been responsible
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waged in the world's history. For the atomic bomb was a
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Dr. Solomon, who has taken an active part in the work 01
one type of atom smashei, the cyclotron, at Cambridge and
Harvard Universities, has here explained for the layman the
nature, purpose, and results ol these epoch-making advances.
This is popular science in the best sense of the term, a volume
that reveals to the non-scientific reader the great sweep ot
modern research

A PELICAN BOOK
(A141)

SCIENCE NEWS
II

Edited by JOHN ENOGAT and R. E. PEIERLS

THIS second issue of Science News is devoted entirely to the
subject of Atomic Energy, which is indeed science news in its
most spectacular form. All the articles have been written
by scientists who, at the time when the plans for it were made,
were working at Los Alamos, UJS.A., on the project which
eventually led to the first atomic bomb. Some are British,
some American.

The first article contains a general survey of the whole field,
and forms the key to the rest. The second and last articles
explain the general background. The remainder deal with
special aspects of the field.

CONTENTS
EDITORIAL NOTE

THE RELEASE OF ATOMIC ENERGY . R. E. PeieHs
ATOMS AND NUCLEI H. A. Bethe

PRODUCTION OF ATOMIC FUEL

BY ISOTOPE SEPARATION R. E. Peterls

THE TAMING OF ATOMIC POWER AND THE

PRODUCTION OF PLUTONIUM H. L. Anderson

THE PHYSICS OF THE BOMB P. Morrison

RADIOACTIVE TRACERS M. Argo and E. Teller

THE TOOLS OF NUCLEAR PHYSICS 0. R. Frisch

THE THINGS WE SEE-
INDOORS AND OUT

By ALAN JARVIS

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